Re: Is news.answers dead?

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Dave Schweisguth (dcs@proton.chem.yale.edu)
Tue, 12 Dec 1995 09:20:47 -0500 (EST)

Omer writes:
> My own 6.2 agorot (2 cents in the current rate of exchange of Israeli
> Shekels): I think that the news.answers mechanism of distributing FAQs is
> not so relevant nowadays, when several can publish any information they
> want in WWW sites. The news.answers was relevant in the pre-WWW era.

One can hardly require everyone who is now posting an FAQ in the traditional
manner to switch to WWW overnight. As long as there are useful postings which
aren't otherwise archived, news.answers is necessary. Efforts to make a WWW
presence easier for FAQ maintainers are of course all to the good, but let's
not start the revolution before we've got some ammo.

> I suggest that news.answers be replaced by a special purpose FAQ search
> engine. FAQ maintainers will register their FAQ WWW pages with the special
> search engine. The search engine maintainer will also provide Web-by-mail
> service for those who need the FAQs and don't have WWW access. The
> messages in news.answers group will consist only of URLs of FAQs and FAQ
> WWW search engines.

Replaced? No. Joined? Certainly.

If the LOPIP ("list of periodic informational postings") included the URL:
aux header, it would be about half of what you want. If it could be rendered
in a nice searchable WWW format, it would be the other half. The latter
sounds like a good project if you want to put your shekels where your mouth
is. (Unless it's been done, but I'm not aware of it.)

> Another component which would be helpful in solving the puzzle is some
> volunteers who have WWW sites and are willing to host FAQ pages of people
> who do not have their own WWW sites.

This is certainly true. I suspect that there are any number of WWW sites
which would be glad to host irrelevant FAQs for the sake of attracting
attention to the rest of the site, but a single, central, neutral site
would keep us out of conflicts-of-interest and provide some consistency.

Cheers,

-- 
| Dave Schweisguth                        For purposes of complying with    |
| dcs@proton.chem.yale.edu (MIME OK)      the New Jersey Right to Know Act: |
| http://proton.chem.yale.edu/~dcs/       Contents partially unknown.       |
| Yale Depts. of MB&B & Chemistry   Phone: 203-432-5208   Fax: 203-432-6144 |

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