You raised some good points, and at the end of the day I really wonder if enough people would find the feature useful enough to merit its inclusion even though I still think it would be handy for me... It's not too difficult to see how this feature could be abused and unnecessarily anger others, though I have to say if given the choice between something that is on topic, but copied from another site, and spam from a drug company, I know what I'd rather see ;-)

Still, I think I was considering a more modest capability than what you suggested. If I'm a user asking a question, then by cross-pointing it, I'm implicitly saying that I'm willing to check Perlmonks and the newsgroup for possible responses. I wouldn't expect newsgroup replies to be automatically fed into Perlmonks. A responder is going to either A) Go to Perlmonks to reply, or reply to the newsgroup. I expect that this would not be a common use case. Many come to Perlmonks for a greater signal/noise ratio than they get from newsgroups.

I would expect that this might be used more often by individuals who create a response to a question that they feel is worth the trouble of cross posting, because it might deliver value even if some of the context is lost. The cross-poster may even provide the additional context. Not all posts to Perlmonks are responses to questions though... There are nodes posted to snippets, Cool uses, etc that are often standalone.

Thanks for the thoughtful response

Rob