I found that the insistance on the order of the newsgroups on the
Newsgroups: line was rather anal.
What purpose, specifically, does it serve to have an order imposed on that
line?
>From our "moderation FAQ", which contains the answers to many
*.answers-related questions that are not included in "*.answers
submission guidelines because either (a) they are of interest only to
the moderators or (b) we do not believe they are of sufficient
interest to justify increasing the length of the guidelines:
>======== Why do we ask for *.answers to be at the end of Newsgroups line?
>
>Requiring that the *.answers newsgroups be last on the Newsgroups line
>has several subtle, technical motivations. They include:
>
>- Newsgroup volume statistics: You may have noticed the monthly Usenet
>readership reports on news.lists. These provide summary statistics on
>volume and estimated readership for the Usenet newsgroups. Due to
>simultaneous cross-posting, the *.answers newsgroups do not add any more
>volume to the news spool than is already there. Since the readership
>statistics credit an article's volume to the *first* newsgroup on the
>Newsgroups line, the volume is properly credited to the "primary"
>newsgroup, and the *.answers newsgroups maintain a cross-posting
>percentage of 100% and a net volume of 0 bytes.
>
>- Buggy news-reading and posting software: In addition to requiring
>simultaneous cross-posting, a Followup-To: header is required to direct
>followups to groups other than *.answers (usually the primary newsgroup
>or newsgroups). However, some newsreader software packages will ignore
>this header.
>
>Some will post the article to all of the original newsgroups. This we
>can't do anything about (except generate a reply and encourage the user
>to report the bug locally). Some will post the article to just the
>*first* of the original newsgroups. With a primary newsgroup first,
>this will at least be the correct choice. Some will even ignore whether
>or not a newsgroup is moderated, and post to it anyway! Keeping the
>moderated *.answers newsgroups last on the Newsgroups header will help
>avoid this extremely pathological behaviour under most circumstances.
>
>- Sorting for index lists and catalogues: The primary newsgroup(s) can
>be thought of as the primary "key" for sorting in databases and lists.
>Since all articles posted to the *.answers newsgroups will have one or
>more of the *.answers newsgroups in the Newsgroups: header, this is not
>a significant "key." This makes it easier for software that sorts
>articles by parsing the Newsgroups header left to right. This has an
>analogue in library card-catalogs, where the words "The, A, and An" are
>ignored for sorting purposes (usually by moving them to the end).
>
>--
>Paul W. Schleck
I hope this answers your question.
Next, the newgroup that I maintain the FAQ for, alt.beer, is NOT, I repeat
NOT limited to the United States. Why should we be forced to use MM/DD/YY
for the date?
There is no such requirement. You can use whatever date format you
want. If there is something in the "*.answers submission guidelines"
posting which you think implies that we require a specific date format
in any part of an FAQ posting (other than requiring that the Date and
Expires headers are in a format that is RFC-conformant, of course),
please tell us what it is so we can clarify it.
I can't find the format MM/DD/YY used anywhere in the current version
of the guidelines. I do see YY/MM/DD and YYYY/MM/DD, both of which
are, I think, suitably "international" for your needs. In any case,
both of those formats are used only in examples of optional *.answers
headers, and nowhere in the guidelines is there a discussion
specifically devoted to date formats. If we had date format
requirements, they would be specifically discussed in the guidelines.
Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@security.ov.com
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