Let's be accurate, shall we? What I actually wrote was:
>I have no problem with him not having time to update the posts to be better
>or improved. That does take time. Posting six posts which have already been
>written and used for a considerable period of time takes five minutes max.
And I proved that to myself yesterday when I posted those six posts to
news.newusers.questions.
Btw, as for there being more than five minutes of work in the updates,
I'm willing to say that the updates done for those six posts could have been
done in 15 minutes. While there were some new intro posts which clearly
took some time, the actual changes to the six existing posts amounted to
around 50 lines, with several of those being changes of only a few words.
These are from the diff files posted along with the newusers posts yesterday.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
! investigate in those groups. In fact, post your question at once,
! to as many technical groups as you can think of, concluding your
! request with the line "Please reply by mail, as I do not follow this
! group." (No one will find such a statement impertinent; remember,
! the net is a resource to help you.)
!
! There is no need to read the groups in advance or examine the
! "frequently asked question" lists to see if the topic has already
! been dealt with. Any such warnings are for people without your
! innate sense of netiquette, and whose uninspired questions are bound
! to be repetitive. Your question is sure to be unique; no point
! checking the list to see if the answer might be there already. How
! could it be, when you only just thought of the question?
+ Please do not use Usenet as a resource for homework assignments
+ Usenet is not a resource for homework or class assignments. A common
+ new user reaction to learning of all these people out there holding
+ discussions is to view them as a great resource for gathering
+ information for reports and papers. Trouble is, after seeing a few
+ hundred such requests, most people get tired of them, and won't reply
+ anyway. Certainly not in the expected or hoped-for numbers. Posting
+ student questionnaires automatically brands you a "newbie" and does not
+ usually garner much more than a tiny number of replies.
+
+ Instead, read the group of interest for a while, and find out what the
+ main "threads" are - what are people discussing? Are there any themes
+ you can discover? Are there different schools of thought?
+
+ Only post something after you've followed the group for a few weeks,
+ after you have read the Frequently Asked Questions posting if the group
+ has one, and if you still have a question or opinion that others will
+ probably find interesting. If you have something interesting to
+ contribute, you'll find that you gain almost instant acceptance, and
+ your posting will generate a large number of follow-up postings. Use
+ these in your research; it is a far more efficient (and accepted) way
+ to learn about the group than to follow that first instinct and post a
+ simple questionnaire.
+
! regularly. If you have access to telnet, connect to ds.internic.net
! convention is that the user's email address is supplied as the
! password, e.g. "yourname@yoursite". This is useful to those
* People can only grasp about seven things at once. This means ideas in a
paragraph, major sections, etc..
+ * Do not include the entire article that you are replying to. Cut down
+ the part that you include to the absolute minimum needed to provide
+ context to your reply.
+
+ * If your article goes over one screenful, use subheadings to organize it.
+ Numbering your paragraphs is rarely helpful.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry, but this hardly counts as major updating of these posts. I update
the r.a.c. FAQ more than that every month, and while my major update on
taking it over did cause it to be a week late, it was one where considerable
new information was added and old information confirmed and updated. Of
course, I also posted to r.a.c.info about the delay and the reason for it.
>My thanks to the news.answers moderation team for their patience. They (and
>the people who sent in corrections and updates) have my apologies for the
>delay.
Don't bother to apologize to anyone who actually expected these to be
posted on a regular basis...or to people like a friend of mine who had
to go hunting for them last September when they weren't in n.n.a.
in order to send them to her brother who'd just gotten on the net.
>I've been around Usenet long enough to not be surprised or dismayed by
>the fact that none of the people who're moaning and bitching so loudly on
>this list about my (admittedly dismal) delay in posting the FAQs bothered
>to send me email, and still have the nerve to say that they don't want to
>maintain the FAQs, but are quite willing to post them. Frankly, some of
>those people might benefit from reading rather than posting the newusers
>FAQs.
Sorry, kiddo, but I've been on Usenet since 1980 (by happening to have
done undergrad at UNC-CH at the right time). Note that I didn't send you
email because, like Matthew, I'd forgotten your address by this point and
because the news-answers team said they'd already been sending you email.
And I'm quite impressed by the chutzpah expressed in your attribution of
"nerve" to people who thought that it was important that this information
be readily available as quickly as possible, given your dismal performance,
even if they might have had reasons for not wanting to be the long term
maintainer. In my own case, I learned from when I previously posted the
six core posts on n.n.q. back in October, due to your delays, that newbies
would email the poster with questions. Due to my work, I'm sometimes offnet
for a week or more per month, making me a bad choice for a permanent role.
I'll reiterate something I said during the debate; if you're bothered by
someone wanting to get out this critical information after a three month
plus slack period, you've got the wrong attitude for the job. Bothered by
it if you were posting regularly, or a week late with posted explanation,
no problem. After three plus months, problem.
>Send me email (provided you don't expect a reply in under 5 hours,
>as Mr. Galloway apparently does).
Nah, I don't expect email replies in under 5 hours. I expect
news.announce.newusers postings on a monthly basis. Oh, and note that
my original timeframe for posting the posts to n.a. hasn't expired yet;
I was going to do it tomorrow. It was only after it became clear that
n.a. was not going to work out that I went ahead and posted to n.n.q.
>Finally, if you seriously want to take over ownership of some or all of
>the postings, send me email and we can discuss that too. I'm not
>particularly possessive about them.
I'll be honest here. I hope someone does (see above for why I don't think
I should). Given the amount of modification to the six core posts, there's
no reason they shouldn't have been posted regularly long ago. One wasn't
even modified at all. And rather than apologizing for screwing up the job
until yesterday, you're copping an attitude about how unreasonable it
was for I and others to want this information to get out. I honestly hope
that if you continue in charge of these posts that you do a good job
with them, and if you did so for the next year, I'd be more than happy
to post or email a note of congratulations for doing so and thank you
for doing the work (note: don't hold me to remembering to do this. I'll
try to, but I could easily forget it in a year. If Mark, or someone else,
emailed me a reminder in a year, I'd not have a problem with such). But
your track record so far is not one to inspire confidence.
tyg tyg@hq.ileaf.com
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