1) Growing pains. Are your FAQ's getting awkward and unsure of themselves?
2) Running away from home. Some parents neglect their FAQs, and others
come along to care for them. Foster care services largely don't exist,
and there's no good way to manage adoption.
3) Stealing from their parents. As FAQ's are boisterous youth, they
consume inordinate amounts of their parent's time and even money,
and it seems like you're always entertaining all the characters they
bring home with them.
Seriously, I've been doing the Typing Injury FAQ for 2.5 years now
(sheesh!) and I'm having all kinds of trouble keeping up with the
flood of new products and changes in listings for the old ones. Do
you delegate authority for subsections? I haven't heard from the guy
maintaining one of my subsections for months! I know I need a section
listing pointing devices, but I just don't have the time to create and
maintain one. I blew three days converting everything to HTML, and
now I use lynx to generate the ASCII. It looks great in HTML, but I'm
entirely unhappy with the ASCII. Which do I prioritize?
And, I haven't even begun to rant and rave about the on-line behavior
of some of the vendors I've been tracking over the years. By and
large, computer vendors understand netiquette, but I've seen other
vendors reply to *every* message posted to a mailing list to hawk
their warez. Of course, this one vendor never seems to notice that
the LISTSERV generates Reply-To: lines which directed his responses
back to the list, for everybody to see.
What do you do when a vendor approaches you asking to please list a
product which you consider to be utterly bogus and possibly physically
harmful? Do you list it, for the sake of completeness, or do you
cut it?
My biggest fear is being sued by somebody because I gave them "bad
advice" which made their condition worse. How can I cover myself?
Should I get a lawyer to write me a monster disclaimer? Barf.
Sure, WWW technology is the greatest thing since the vacuum tube, but
we've got plenty of other things to worry about, eh?
-- Dan Wallach // dwallach@cs.princeton.edu // Phone#: 609-683-4673 http://www.cs.princeton.edu/grad/dwallach/
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