I've been working on a fairly extensive FAQ (400K-plus; over
20 independently-posted sections) about fusion energy research,
and after posting a number of drafts to the native newsgroup
(sci.physics.fusion) I finally put together the official FAQ headers
and submitted a number of pieces to sci.answers and news.answers
to go through the moderation process.
Now I'm fairly new at this job, so naturally my suggested subject:
and Archive-name: lines were, despite my best efforts to follow the
submission guidelines, not accepted. The moderator who responded
did a reasonable job of suggesting better subject: and Archive-name:
lines, but there are a number of uniquenesses to the situation my
FAQ is in, and I wanted to suggest some modifications to her suggestions
so that the subject: and Archive-name: lines would better reflect the
content and structure of the FAQ.
Now, I feel it would be reasonable to simply write back and ask
the moderators to evaluate my new suggestions, and negotiate what
the headers should be, but apparently an FAQ and its headers
are only considered when and if you submit them as articles to
the moderators, or else whenever you send email back to the *.answers
moderators, they just stick it back at the end of the incoming mail
spool. It seems really ridiculous to me that I should have to sit
down for several hours to repost and retransmit several hundred K worth of
FAQ, and wait for *another* 2 weeks, just to get someone to advise
me on whether my new ideas for a few bytes worth of headers are
now acceptable. I sent email asking if that's what I had to do,
and haven't had any reply for 4 days, so apparently I can't even ask
what I should do to have my suggestions discussed without having to
wait for two weeks for the mail to get queued up.
I realize that the moderators have a tremendous workload, but it
seems to me that it would be a lot more efficient for all involved
if, once an FAQ wiggles its way to the top of the submission queue,
further correspondence on the FAQ could be expedited so that the
overall approval time for an FAQ could remain fairly low. As it
is, I will have had to submit my FAQ and/or discussion regarding
the FAQ three or four times, and if each time it gets hung up in
the submission queue for two weeks, that's nearly 2 *months* where
I have no idea whether my FAQ is going to be approved
and suddenly appear on the newsgroups to which it should be posted,
or whether it will just disappear into limbo. This on a network
that prides itself on getting articles transmitted worldwide in
minutes, hours, or at worst days. Meanwhile, the readers
of the (non-*.answers) groups are wondering where this FAQ is,
and I can't tell if I should post it to the groups or not, since
I don't know whether it's about to be approved or not.
I realize I'm whining, but if the processing time for anything sent to
the *.answers moderators is going to take two weeks, and I can't get
any answers to even simple questions regarding the headers for my FAQ
without waiting in line all over again, and when it takes as long as
it does for me to transmit each section of the FAQ by hand over my
modem, then I really start to question whether it's even worth trying
to have the FAQ crossposted to sci.answers and news.answers, and that's
not right. There ought to be a way to improve this system.
Sorry for ranting and raving but would someone please provide me
with some guidance on how to navigate this nightmare more efficiently?
***********************************************************************
Robert F. Heeter, rfheeter@pppl.gov
FAQ Maintainer for the Conventional Fusion FAQ on sci.physics.fusion.
(Sheesh, I work in a government lab, and *they're* not even this
inefficient and bureacratic!)
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