Welcome to the faq-maintainers or faq-maintainer-announce mailing
list. This document explains the purpose of the lists and some
administrative details.
******** What are these mailing lists?
The faq-maintainers and faq-maintainers-announce lists are primarily
intended for discussion among (faq-maintainers), or announcements for
(faq-maintainers-announce), people on the net who maintain FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) postings. However, subscribers are not
required to maintain FAQs; i.e., anyone interested in FAQ maintenance
is welcomed.
Issues discussed on the faq-maintainers list in the past have
included: formatting FAQs; commenting about specific commercial
products in FAQs; and using software to assist in the posting and
maintenance of FAQ postings. Although a wide variety of topics are
discussed, using the list for discussions which do not specifically
pertain to FAQ maintenance is discouraged. The maintainers of the
list may occasionally request that a discussion be moved elsewhere,
when they feel that it has strayed too far from the theme of the list.
The faq-maintainers-announce list is for announcements only. For
example, announcements which would be appropriate include the creation
of a new mirror site from which archived *.answers FAQs can be
obtained, and the release of a software tool which is particularly
useful for FAQ maintainers. If you would like to make an announcement
but you are not sure it is appropriate for faq-maintainers-announce,
please ask the maintainers of the list, by writing to to the
administrative address given below, and they'll let you know. The
maintainers of the list will not view kindly the sending of
inappropriate material to the list, and its subscribers won't be too
happy either.
******** How busy and how large are these lists?
The faq-maintainers list contains several hundred names. Traffic tends
to come in bursts -- it averages three to four messages per week, but
during a burst there may be as many as several dozen messages in a
single day, and in between such bursts, there may be weeks of no
messages at all.
The faq-maintainers-announce list contains a couple hundred names, and
in addition automatically includes everyone subscribed to the
faq-maintainers list. Traffic on it is very, very low (e.g., it is
not unheard of for six months to pass with no messages sent to the
list).
******** Administrative details
**** Administrative address
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or make any administrative requests or
comments, send mail to faq-maintainers-request@mit.edu. DO NOT send
administrative messages to either of the mailing lists themselves.
Furthermore, do not initiate "meta-discussions" on the lists about
whether a particular message or discussion was appropriate such
discussions tend to waste bandwidth without accomplishing much of
anything. If you believe that an announcement or discussion was
appropriate, contact the maintainers of the list and we'll take care
of it.
If you recommend the lists to people, make sure to give them the
administrative address, so that they do not send an administrative
request to one of the lists. Note that administrative requests sent
to the lists rather than to the administrative request will probably
be ignored.
Since subscription and unsubscription requests are currently handled
by people (rather than being handled by an automated mailing list
processor), you should not expect an immediate response to requests.
Furthermore, there is an an unavoidable delay of approximately one day
(and sometimes more) between when we process a request and when it our
changes propagate to the mailing list servers.
**** Bounces
Because of the current configuration of the mailing list servers,
bounces from messages to the lists are sometimes returned to the
sender of the message rather than to the maintainers of the lists. If
you receive bounces in response to a message you sent to one of the
lists, please forward them to faq-maintainers-request@mit.edu.
DO NOT write to us explaining how we can fix the configuration so that
bounces will get sent to us. We know how to do that, but we do not
have control over the software on the mailing list servers. The
people who do have said that they'll fix the problem eventuallly.
When an address on one of the lists bounces, and we cannot confirm
that the bounce was caused by a transient problem, we will try for at
least three business days to find a working address for the subscriber
or to get the appropriate site postmasters to fix the problem. If the
problem cannot be resolved in that time, we will remove the address
from the mailing list.
**** Archives
We have available to us an archive of all messages sent to the lists
since their creation. Although we cannot make archives of messages
sent prior to December 31, 1993 publicly available, we may be able to
search our archives for a specific message or discussion. If you
would like us to find something in these archives for you, please
contact us at the administrative address.
You should be aware that any messages sent to the list after December
31, 1993 may be made publicly available, since recent changes in our
handling of the lists have made it possible for us to offer a public
archive. This archive is not yet available, since details about it
have not yet been finalized. We must emphasize that you should not
assume that the lists are private -- public archives of traffic from
1994 and beyond WILL eventually be available.
**** Addressing mail to the mailing lists
Send mail to faq-maintainers by addressing it to
faq-maintainers@mit.edu. Similarly, address mail for
faq-maitainers-announce to faq-maintainers-announce@mit.edu. Since
the faq-maintainers-announce list includes the faq-maintainers list,
you should never address one piece of mail to both mailing lists; if
you do, subscribers to faq-maintainers may receive duplicates.
When sending mail to faq-maintainers-announce, you should send it in
such a way that replies go to either you alone or to you and the
faq-maintainers list i.e., the faq-maintainers-announce list is for
announcements only, and discussion of announcements should take place
somewhere other than on faq-maintainers-announce.
For example, if you wanted to send an announcement to
faq-maintainers-announce list with discussion of it taking place on
the faq-maintainers list, you could use these headers lines:
To: your_address@host.org
Reply-To: faq-maintainers@mit.edu
X-Hidden-To: faq-maintainers-announce@mit.edu
BCC: faq-maintainers-announce@mit.edu
If you want to write to faq-maintainers-announce and are unsure of how
to do so properly, please contact us at the administrative address for
assistance, or send your message to us and ask us to resend it to the
list for you.
******** The end
-- The faq-maintainers and faq-maintainers-announce list administrators
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