Welcome to the faq-maintainers or faq-maintainers-announce mailing
list. This document explains the purpose of the lists and some
administrative details. In addition to being sent to all new
subscribers, it is sent to the lists themselves approximately every
ninety days to refresh people's memories.
******** What are these mailing lists?
The faq-maintainers and faq-maintainers-announce lists are primarily
intended for discussion among (faq-maintainers), or announcements for
(faq-maintainers-announce), people on the net who maintain FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) postings. However, subscribers are not
required to maintain FAQs; i.e., anyone interested in issues related to
maintaining FAQs is welcome.
Issues discussed on the faq-maintainers list in the past have included:
formatting FAQs; how to handle comments about specific commercial
products in FAQs; and using software to assist in the posting and
maintenance of FAQ postings. Although a wide variety of topics are
discussed, using the list for discussions which do not specifically
pertain to FAQ maintenance is discouraged. The maintainers of the list
may occasionally request that a discussion be moved elsewhere, when they
feel that it has strayed too far from the theme of the list.
The faq-maintainers-announce list is for announcements only. For
example, announcements which would be appropriate include the creation
of a new mirror site from which archived *.answers FAQs can be
obtained, or the release of a software tool which is particularly
useful for FAQ maintainers. The faq-maintainers-announce mailing list
was made a moderated one as of April 1994, to prevent unnecessary
traffic which didn't qualify as announcements.
******** How busy and how large are these lists?
The faq-maintainers list has several hundred subscribers. Traffic
tends to come in bursts -- it averages 3-4 messages per day, but
during a burst there may be as many as several dozen messages within a
few hours, and in between such bursts, there may be a week of no
messages at all.
The faq-maintainers-announce list also has several hundred of its own
subscribers; in addition, it automatically includes everyone
subscribed to the faq-maintainers list. Traffic on it is very, very
low (e.g., it is not unheard of for six months to pass with no
messages sent to the list except for a periodic copy of this document).
******** Administrative details
**** Administrative address
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or make any administrative requests or
comments, send mail to faq-maintainers-request@mit.edu. DO NOT send
administrative messages to either of the mailing lists themselves.
Furthermore, do not initiate "meta-discussions" on the lists about
whether a particular message or discussion was appropriate; such
discussions tend to waste bandwidth without accomplishing anything. If
you believe that an announcement or discussion was inappropriate,
contact the maintainers of the list and we'll take care of it.
If you recommend the lists to people, make sure to give them the
administrative address, so that they do not send an administrative
request to one of the lists. Note that administrative requests sent to
the lists rather than to the administrative request address will
probably be ignored.
Since subscription and unsubscription requests are currently handled by
people (rather than being handled by an automated mailing list
processor), you should not expect an immediate response to requests.
Furthermore, there is an an unavoidable delay of approximately one day
(and sometimes more) between when we process a request and when it our
changes propagate to the mailing list servers.
**** Bounces
Because of the current configuration of the mailing list servers,
bounces from messages to the lists are sometimes returned to the sender
of the message rather than to the maintainers of the lists. If you
receive bounces in response to a message you sent to one of the lists,
please forward them to faq-maintainers-request@mit.edu.
DO NOT write to us explaining how we can fix the configuration so that
bounces will get sent to us. We know how to do that, but we do not have
control over the software on the mailing list servers. The people who
do have said that they'll fix the problem eventually.
When an address on one of the lists bounces, and we cannot confirm that
the bounce was caused by a transient problem, we will try for at least
three business days to find a working address for the subscriber or to
get the appropriate site postmasters to fix the problem. If the problem
cannot be resolved in that time, we will remove the address from the
mailing list.
******** Archives
We have available to us an archive of all messages sent to the lists
since their creation. Although we cannot make archives of messages sent
prior to December 31, 1993 publicly available, we may be able to search
our archives for a specific message or discussion. If you would like us
to find something in these archives for you, please contact us at the
administrative address.
You should be aware that any messages sent to the list after December
31, 1993 are publicly available, since recent changes in our handling
of the lists have made it possible for us to offer a public archive.
You can access the archives in rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/faq-maintainers via
anonymous FTP. See the README file for details on archive format.
******** Addressing mail to the mailing lists
Send mail to faq-maintainers by addressing it to
faq-maintainers@mit.edu. Similarly, address mail for
faq-maintainers-announce to faq-maintainers-announce@mit.edu. Since the
faq-maintainers-announce list includes the faq-maintainers list, you
should never address one piece of mail to both mailing lists; if you do,
subscribers to faq-maintainers may receive duplicates.
If you send email to faq-maintainers-announce, we will either approve
it and distribute it for you, or reply to you explaining why we feel
it is inappropriate for that mailing list.
******** Policy concerning removal from the lists
The administrators reserve the right to remove individuals from the
lists under extraordinary circumstances. It is difficult to
anticipate every reason why someone might be removed from the lists;
in general, behavior which is substantially disruptive to the list and
which is known by the perpetrator to be inappropriate may lead to
removal.
An individual who is removed from the lists will be notified of the
removal by the administrators. If he or she wishes to appeal the
removal, a poll will be taken of the current membership of the
faq-maintainers list. If 10% or more of the current membership
supports reinstatement, the individual will be returned to the lists.
-- The faq-maintainers and faq-maintainers-announce list administrators:pshuang@mit.edu (Ping Huang) jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan I. Kamens) ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Koenig) buglady@bronze.lcs.mit.edu (Aliza R. Panitz) pgreene@optics.rochester.edu (Pamela Greene)
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved