Of late I've been plagued (well, maybe not plagued, but irritated) by an
unusual number of off-charter posts in the group I moderate
(rec.music.reviews). When I've informed the perpetrators of their heinous
misdeeds the general response has been that they hadn't seen anything
stating what tey could/couldn't post.
One lesson I've learned from this is that once a month probably isn't often
enough for posting the FAQ, so I'll be reducing that to fortnightly
(anything more frequent would be intrusive and would doubtless result in
the FAQ outnumbering the real posts). However, due to my being both the
group moderator and the group FAQ maintainer, another idea has crossed my
mind, and I thought I'd bounce it around here to see if anyone had any
interesting suggestions or has any experience of doing this sort of thing
in the past.
The idea's a simple one - rig the moderation software (which I'm currently
in the process of rewriting prior to shifting moderation to this new site)
so that each and every message posted contains a pointer to the FAQ. Of
course this won't eliminate all off-charter posts (there'll always be
someone who, after reading one post decides this is *just* the place to
post their ad) but it might help those who look for a FAQ before posting
but can't find it.
The big question is, where to put the pointer? Two possibilities present
themselves, although I'd appreciate any other ideas since I find neither to
be totally satisfactory.
1. In the header. I could stick an X- field into the header containing the
necessary stuff. The benefit of this is that it isn't too intrusive, the
disadvantage is that on many newsreaders it'll be so unintrusive as to
be invisible, due to the weeding out of headers by newsreaders. Given
the changing demographic of the net population, the likelihood that a
new reader will be one of those using a user-friendly, simplified
interface that hides as many headers as possible seems to be quite high.
2. At the end of the body. The information could be in a "second signature"
tagged on after the users own signature. This sort of thing seems to
work rather well in rec.humor.funny but I try to let users posts through
as unaltered as possible, and this approach is aesthetically unpleasant.
At the moment I'm tending to favour the latter approach. It's still far
from ideal but seems to be more likely to reach the intended audience than
using a header field. Does anyone have any comments on the desirability or
otherwise of either of these approaches, or know of any other ideas from
ramming FAQ information down the readers throats in an unobtrusive fashion?
Al
-- Al Crawford - awrc@access.digex.net "Click Click Drone"
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