I'm sorry, but this strikes me as being way over on the bureaucratic end of
the "loose cannon --- bureaucrat" spectrum.
I would hope that the intent and purpose of news.answers is to facilitate
providing information to Usenet, and rules are a means of doing so in a
reasonable manner. Rather than the purpose being to adhere to rules over
such facilitation in all circumstances.
Let's once again look at the situation:
1) We're talking about information of considerable importance to all of
Usenet in terms of newbie orientation. Side issue: the number of newbies
is greater than at any time in Usenet history. Side point: we're not
talking about a single group, but posts that every new user is
encouraged to read.
2) We're talking about a maintainer who has not posted this information
for at least three, and likely more than six, months...and at best only
once in that six month plus period.
3) The material that people want posted has already been approved by
news-answers-request. This is not a matter of someone wanting to
change the material, just make it available again.
4) This is a recognized problem, even by several news-answers-request
people.
Now, the very obvious to me answer is for someone, me, news-answers-request,
anyone, I don't care one whit who, to repost this information to
*.answers. Now. If the current moderator gets his act together and
starts posting the material, great. No problem. But right now, we need
to address the actual problem of the information not being anywhere near
as easily available as it should be.
This is not a case of "deciding who gets to post a FAQ" or "'reassign'
a FAQ to a new maintainer". It's a case of just posting badly needed
information as a stopgap until the issue of whether there should be a
new moderator is settled.
>Now, about this particular case.... The maintainer of the
>news.announce.newusers FAQs has responded to our queries and has
>stated (at least, up until now) that he is still maintaining and
>posting the FAQs. There really is nothing more that we can do. If
Excuse me? There's rather clear evidence that he has *not* been posting
the FAQs. That's the whole problem. Am I reading this wrong, or are you
actually stating that you'll go with email saying "I'm posting them"
over seeing that they've not been posted?
>discussions. In any case, considering how much work moderating
>*.answers is nowadays, we do not have time to discuss our internal
>correspondence records every time someone asks about them on faq-maintainers.
Have you considered applying for a job in Washington D.C.? Sorry, but
the attitude I'm seeing expressed here by news-answers-request folk is
leaving a very bad taste in my mouth. I'd sum it up as "Rules don't let
us solve this problem. We don't have to tell you anything about the problem.
Despite it being a problem that affects the whole Usenet. And people making
attempts to solve the problem are futile because of our rules." I sympathize
and appreciate the work y'all do, but the total inflexability to deal with
a recognized problem here is ridiculous.
> Personally, I've no vested interest in being the one to do this, so I'd
> have no problem were the news.answers team to repost the posts to
> the *.answers groups rather than myself.
>
>That's not our job. We can't do that if the current maintainer still
>claims ownership of the FAQs. See above.
Yes you can. If you're willing to look at this as a problem that needs to
be addressed, rather than following rules like an automaton. I, personally,
would dearly love to hear an argument about just why it's so horrible to
repost information that's the same as the last posting of such (and clearly
not severely outdated), particularly when the information has not been
posted at anywhere near the previously established frequency...to the point
that it's expired at news.answers. Other than the one of "Well, it's against
these rules..." which isn't an argument or reason, but an appeal to authority.
Btw, note that the news-answers folk have been setting the reply-to line
to news-answers-request, rather than faq-maintainers. If others have been
responding to their messages, I and others on faq-maintainers haven't seen
the response.
tyg tyg@hq.ileaf.com
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