Re: How did *you* get into this business?

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> What's interesting to me about all these stories (I'll spare you mine) is
> the number of people who've related that they just up and started
> maintaining an FAQ list one day. Given how contentious the denizens of
> Usenet newsgroups can be (and the more a group needs an FAQ list, the more
> contentious it's likely to be) I always assumed that someone would raise a
> hue and cry (on principle, if for no other reason) if a self-appointed
> maintainer dared to start posting something as important as an FAQ list
> without first kowtowing and getting a consensus from the group.

OK, you finally roped me into contributing to this. I maintain the 23, soon to
be 24, part soc.culture.jewish FAQ and reading lists. In the case of the FAQ,
we had a committee that worked for about a year developing the questions and
answers. The FAQ then just sat. And sat. Later, I found out it was because the
Orthodox folks didn't want to post it, because, if there was an error, they'd
be in big trouble for having mislead someone. Myself, being Reform, felt that
I would just fix the error on the next posting, and thus offered to get it
into postable form and post it. This I did.

A similar thing happened with the reading list. THere was a small reading list
being posted, and I was posting the Reform Reading List. The fellow posting
the reading list, who was Orthodox, stopped posting it because he didn't want
to lead people wrong. I felt it was important to be out there, took a day off
from work to do research, and developed the reading lists for posting.

Being a NIH (not invented here) person, and not liking the complexity of the
separate database for the posting script that was recommended by the
moderators, I have rolled my own FAQ posting script (in perl) that is
controlled entirely by information in the FAQ file. I'm now contemplating
modifying the script to be able to grok HTML, and converting my FAQs (thanks
to the recent discussion here).

Has it helped me in my work? Not really, as my work is unrelated to the
subject of my FAQ. I've gained more of a reputation from the 835-member
mailing list I run.

Daniel

• Next message: J.D. Falk: "Re: How did *you* get into this business?"
• Previous message: Omer Zak: "Re: How did *you* get into this business?"
• In reply to: Steve Summit: "Re: How did *you* get into this business?"
• Next in thread: Bill Keyes aka the Ferret-Meister: "Re: How did *you* get into this business?"

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