Anyway, I'm not sure that FAQ's are obsolete -- I think maybe Usenet news
is obsolete, and that FAQ's are less useful as a consequence.
Remember that Way Back When FAQ's were created as a way to stop the flood
of repetitive questions/arguments that took place in numerous newsgroups.
Well, it's not clear at all that this is happened -- if anything, the
situation is worse -- and it's not clear to me that it's going to improve
anytime soon. The flood of new users joining the 'net will exacerbate every
problem we currently face, from spamming to "unsubscribe me" requests
to senseless alt.* newsgroup creation.
I have been thinking this for about six months -- I left my previous
job and didn't take another one, so I've had lots of time to pursue
my non-Internet hobby, whitewater kayaking. While driving all over
the eastern U.S., I had a lot of time to mull this over. Briefly,
here's what I've come up with:
1. News is obsolete. Even the best newsreaders (strn is my
nominee) don't make it possible to wade through the flood
of traffic. Signal-to-noise is at an all-time low. Arguments
about the namespace rage endlessly. Forgeries abound. Spool
space requirements often force short expiration times. FAQ's
still get asked and argued everywhere. NNTP, INN, and other
tools have brought us a long way from B News 2.10, but managing
news is still time-consuming. Threading helps, killfiles help,
scoring helps, but there's just too much news.
2. Mailing lists are obsolete. Single points-of-distribution
get overloaded. Multiple conflicting automated managers exist
(e.g. listserv, majordomo, etc.). Bounced messages often end
up in subscriber's mailboxes. Newsgroup<->mailing list gateways
sometimes work, sometimes don't. Forgeries abound. Lack of
a threaded mail-reader (as far as I know) makes followup complex
conversations difficult. FAQ's still get asked and argued.
3. As a consequence of 2 & 3, FAQ's don't work...or, rather,
they don't work nearly as well as we'd like them to.
Folks, I think it's time to design the next step beyond news and mailing
lists. It's got to provide the capabilities of both, work over IP & non-IP
connected network links, provide message and user authentication, interoperate
with ftp, gopher and wais, support text-only readers as well as GUI-based
readers, have mechanisms like threading and scoring, cancelling and moderation,
and be backward-compatible so that existing mail and news traffic
can be fed into it.
Oh. FAQ's? I think FAQ's have to be an integral part of the design, not
an afterthought. If they serve no other function that keeping repetitive
traffic down, they'll be well worth it. (And they almost certainly will
do more than that.)
It's a *huge* task; but so was getting people off A news. :-) And if we
don't do it, we may very well be stuck with whatever incompetent monstrosity
some bozos at Microsoft foist off on us. However, this isn't the right
forum to discuss it, so I'll stop here and ask (a) does anyone know of
such a discussion already in progress? and (b) if not, should we start one?
---Rsk
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