Date: Fri, 18 Feb 94 08:50:21 EST
From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@MIT.EDU>
Of course, there is a technical solution to your problem. If you
seriously do not want to receive any of the de.answers postings, you
can unsubscribe to news.answers and subscribe to all of
{alt,comp,misc,rec,sci,soc}.answers. After all, these groups were
created so that people could select which hierarchy they wanted a FAQ
from. That way, you will never see a German - language posting again
(assuming you have also unsubscribed from soc.culture.austrian,
soc.culture.swiss and soc.culture.german.
As far as my understanding goes, news.answers was created to be a
repository of ALL periodic articles on Usenet, regardless of language.
This has been moderation policy for quite some time.
This is how things are *supposed* to be, but unfortunately, the status
quo is not so simple.
I wrote a simple script to determine from the List of Periodic
Informational Postings how many postings have news.answers as the only
*.answers group on their Newsgroups lines, how many have just
*.answers newsgroups other than news.answers on their Newsgroups
lines, and how many have both. The results:
In just news.answers: 115
In just *.answers: 4
In both: 621
What this means is that a site which unsubscribes from news.answers
may miss out on as much as 115 FAQ postings (although many of them
will get transmitted to the site through the other newsgroups to which
they're cross-posted).
Why are there so many FAQs posted to just news.answers? Because the
moderators of *.answers have never taken the significant amount of
time that would be required to get all the FAQ maintainers who
submitted to news.answers before *.answers were created to add the
appropriate *.answers newsgroups to their Newsgroups lines. We've
sent generic announcements to this list and we've pointed out the
problem to specific maintainers when we've noticed it, but we haven't
made a wide-scale effort to get all the FAQs up-to-speed.
Furthermore, one FAQ maintainer has explicitly refused to add the
appropriate *.answers newsgroups to his Newsgroups lines. He said,
"The reason I am not using <>.answers is that I do not carry
<>.answers, I do not propagate <>.answers, I do not use <>.answers, I
do not support <>.answers. One month to appease you, the FAQs were
posted to <>.answers. You didn't like the headers, and the easiest
thing for me was to switch it back to what worked fine before." I
asked for him to explain his objections, and he never replied.
Because I'm in a good mood :-), I'll take the hour or so today to
send mail messages to all of the authors in the LoPIP who are missing
the appropriate *.answers groups (except for the one author mentioned
above :-). That may improve things somewhat.
Technically, one might argue that an FAQ which is not cross-posted to
the appropriate *.answers groups is in violation of the charter of
news.answers and should therefore not be approved for posting to the
newsgroup. I don't know if I want to go that far, though.
Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@security.ov.com
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