Re: Improving efficiency of *.answers moderation process

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Jonathan I. Kamens (jik@cam.ov.com)
Thu, 6 Oct 1994 13:14:58 -0400

There are several good reasons why we require notification of changes
in FAQ Subject lines, besides the fact that it helps us maintain the
FAQ archive. In fact, maintenance of the FAQ archive is way down
there on the list of reasons why FAQ maintainers are required to let
us know about Subject changes. The other reasons are:

1) Making sure that the new Subject line the maintainer wants to use
conforms to the *.answers guidelines. It would be nice if we could
assume that once someone read the guidelines, he/she would always
pick approproate (for *.answers) Subject lines ofr his/her FAQs in
the future, but we can't, because people make mistakes about this
just as they occasionally make mistakes about every other *.answers
requirement.

2) Updating the "List of Periodic Informational Postings" ourselves,
based on what we see posted, rather than based on notification from
maintainers of Subject line changes, has been tried in the past.
It doesn't work. And it can't be done automatically, because
there's no good way for a computer program to figure out what
portions of a new Subject line should be wildcarded (e.g., dates
and version numbers).

3) We don't want FAQ maintainers changing their Subject lines all the
time. Consistent Subject lines are a good thing, and we want to
encourage it. By asking maintainers to notify us before changes,
we are sending a clear message that this is not something that
should happen every time the FAQ is posted.

As for what you wrote about using post_faq to submit an FAQ to
*.answers, note that the file that you feed into post_faq as input is
sufficient for us, i.e., you can just add *.answers to its Newsgroups
line, post it with "inews -h", and then remove *.answers from the
Newsgroups line until it's approved.

You can also do "post_faq.pl -debug -inewscmd 'inews -h'" after adding
*.answers to its Newsgroups line to get post_faq.pl to put in all the
correct headers as they will appear when it's posted, and to submit it
to us, without actually modifying the config file, so that the
Supersedes problems you mentioned don't occur.

About the FAQ server -- Tom is right that just mailing to us what you
would mail to the FAQ server is sufficient.

Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@cam.ov.com

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