No, the software on rtfm.mit.edu doesn't do anything like that... for
one thing, many of the archived periodic informational postings aren't
FAQ's and wouldn't contain "FAQ" in their subject lines, and as
someone noted, requests for FAQ's certainly should not be archived.
Nor was there any forgery of approvals involved (the follow-up posting
was posted to alt.tv.red-dwarf only).
The person who followed up to your posting was using software which
didn't add "Re:" to the beginning of the subject line. When our
software saw it, it went "Look, it's a posting in at least one of the
right newsgroups with the right subject line" and went ahead and
archived it. Unfortunately, we can't just force rkive to check to
make sure the author is what we have listed in the LoPIP, since many
people's posting addresses changes slightly pretty much every time
they post. Nor can we just force rkive to check that the newsgroups
line contains the full set of newsgroups (including *.answers), since
we do want to let people be able to post more often to their home
newsgroup(s) than they are scheduled to cross-post into *.answers; to
make rkive check for the full set of newsgroups would mean we would
get lots of false alarm warnings from rkive.
This (someone replying and it getting archived, replacing the real FAQ
in the home newsgroup's directory) is a problem which doesn't occur
often, though (mostly because most software do add the "Re:", I think).
[By the way, this is a reason for us to ask FAQ maintainers to make
their subject lines not *TOO* short. For example, if there were an
FAQ about Macintosh stuff in general, naming it "Macintosh FAQ" would
make the archived copy more susceptible to getting replaced by random
postings, since someone asking where to get the posting might very
well choose the subject line "Macintosh FAQ". But, I don't think I'm
going to make the submission guidelines yet another kilobyte LONGER to
explain this.... :)]
----------------
I'll also take this opportunity to remind people that not everything
needs to be discussed on faq-maintainers, i.e., some things could be
best addressed by just emailing us and asking us. Even for things
which you feel *DO* merit discussion, keep in mind that if you want
the *.answers moderators to definitely take action on something, send
it to us properly at news-answers-request, too, so it gets into our
queue. All the currently active moderators do happen to subscribe to
faq-maintainers, but unless one of us remembers to forward email
which are "action items" into our queue, it's not going to get done.
Ping Huang, member of the *.answers moderation team
(news-answers-request@MIT.EDU)
P.S. Pat, I've fowarded your email into our queue.
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