Point 1:
I am currently a member of the *.answers moderation team, but although I
have rewritten a number of our internal documents, I have not had a hand
at rewriting the guidelines for *.answers submitters, so in this case I
don't have an emotional investment in my own writing, so to speak.
I would like to start by bringing your (and others') attention to this
section in the guidelines document:
| IV. This posting
|
| Comments about, suggestions about or corrections to this posting
| are welcomed. If you would like to ask us to change this posting
| in some way, the method we appreciate most is for you to actually
| make the desired modifications to a copy of the posting, and then
| to send us the modified posting, or a context diff between the
| posted version and your modified version (if you do the latter,
| make sure to include in your mail the "Version:" line from the
| posted version). Submitting changes in this way makes dealing with
| them easier for us and helps to avoid misunderstandings about what
| you are suggesting.
It is quite possible that when you first read this document and you felt
it was needlessly long, nit-picky, etc., you actually commented upon it
to Jonathan Kamens, before I joined the moderators and would thus have
seen your comments. However, if you did not make any comments, then
think how you would feel if somebody *UNCONSTRUCTIVELY* criticized your
OUTPOSTS FAQ both for its contents and for its formatting, in a highly
public forum, completely ignoring any section you might have had
soliciting user feedback on how the document could be made more useful.
Point 2:
The guidelines document currently has the following section titles for
the part of the document which describes what headers you need to use.
| C. Required header fields
| 1. The normal header
| a. Newsgroups (Required)
| b. Subject (Required)
| c. Followup-To (Required) and Reply-To (Optional)
| d. Supersedes, Expires, References (Optional)
| e. Summary (Optional)
| 2. The auxiliary header
| a. Archive-name (Required)
| b. Other archive names (Optional)
| c. Last-modified, Version (Optional)
Yes, some of the sections describe rather esoteric machinations of the
Usenet transport mechanism and how to cater to the foibles of the
various software out there which imperfectly adhere to RFC 1036.
However, a reader who read enough of the introductory paragraphs to
understand that they don't have to worry about fields like "Expires",
which after all *IS MARKED OPTIONAL*, shouldn't find it terribly
tedious to adhere to the guidelines.
[Now, in some ways, it might be nice if instead of flat ASCII text, this
document could be distributed in a foldable file (e.g., sections of text
could be collapsed into just 1 line, the header of the section) so that
the optional parts could be collapsed as distributed, but there's been
enough traffic on faq-maintainers about providing information in a
format which is lowest-common-denominator so all may access it.]
In reference to your text which I quoted at the beginning of this
section, I note that: (a) exactly one header is required in the
secondary (auxillary) header for *.answers cross-postings, and it's
hardly hermetic; (b) in particular, "Expires" is one of the *OPTIONAL*
headers; and (c) the software which the *.answers moderators run on
rtfm.mit.edu to archive postings includes a feature which explicitly
allows changing version numbers and dates in subject lines of FAQ's.
Point 3:
You suggest that some FAQ's (and some maintainers) are better served "by
a specific formatting, that differs from the 'official' FAQ format". I
would like to bring attention to the following text, which while
relatively newly added to the guidelines in explicit form, has been the
guiding policy for *.answers unofficially before its addition.
| B. What the guidelines DON'T specify
|
| These guidelines DO NOT specify a specific, required format for
| the bodies of FAQ postings. Postings in *.answers are not
| required to adhere to "Digest Message Format" format (Internet RFC
| 1153), or MIME (RFC 1341), or HTML, or SGML, or any other text
| format, standard or otherwise.
|
| This omission is intentional. Forcing all *.answers postings to
| adhere to a specific format would dissuade many FAQ maintainers
| from submitting their postings to *.answers. Such a result would
| be in direct contradiction to the chartered purpose of *.answers;
| therefore, FAQ maintainers are free to choose whatever format they
| want (assuming that it is human-readable) for the bodies of their
| postings.
|
| These guidelines also DO NOT specify lower or upper limits for the
| size of an acceptable FAQ posting. However, a pragmatic lower limit
| is set by the requirement that the articles be useful to people. As
| for a pragmatic upper limit, FAQ maintainers may wish to consider
| that some part of their audience may not be able to access very
| large articles at their sites due to intermediary software problems
| (64KB is a common magic number), so postings larger than that may
| not be able to be read by many people.
I have obtained a copy of your OUTPOSTS FAQ and I fail to see in what
manner our guidelines specify something which you feel would be ruinous
to the attempt to deliver the information therein contained.
I will personally vouch that I have personally never turned down an FAQ
which was submitted due to any disagreement with the author with the
kind of formatting of the contents. (I *HAVE*, I will say, suggested to
authors that the complete lack of whitespace makes their FAQ difficult
to read, but in such cases I have immediately noted in the next sentence
that such an observation is *NOT* one which will interferes with the
approval process in any way.)
Point 4:
You insist that "The point is to get information out. Period." I have
seen only a few messages of praise and thanks sent to the *.answers
moderator address, but those which have seem to contain a common theme
that they are grateful for the small semblance of order and organization
which the *.answers provide in the maelstorm of "information" out there.
(There's *PLENTY* of data out there, and it's easy to get more out
there; but, useful information content isn't just measured by the bits
of data that can be pushed out into the net, in my opinion.)
Point 5:
> Some of us have real jobs, and don't get to sit
> and play with FAQ headers all day.
Some of us (well, OK, me, but I don't think the other moderators are
slacking by comparison, either) are working 30 hours a week as a TA to
pay for tuition, spending 20 hours a week working on graduate classes
work, volunteering 15 hours a week to do community service and help run
a college-based service group, and are *STILL* dedicating many hours a
week to endeavors on the net to help provide information to others.
Look, we do the best we can.
Any offers to help rewrite the guidelines in a clearer format (by people
who aren't already so familiar with the process that they could recite
the steps chonologically backwards while asleep), constructive
suggestions for improving the document, etc., will be gratefully
received. Please direct such offers of assistance in this particular
manner to the address news-answers-request@MIT.EDU; discussion rather
than offers of help can remain here on this list.
--- Yours in Leadership, Friendship, and Service, Ping Huang (INTERNET: pshuang@mit.edu), probably speaking for himself
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