I'd been reading news.software.readers for a while to learn more about how
to use the trn newsreader. At some point someone said, "Someone oughta do a
FAQ, but I personally don't have time. Any volunteers?" So I did. I archived
the group for several weeks and compiled the FAQs and answers -- actually I
included almost everything anyone asked about, regardless of whether it
could be considered "frequently asked" or not -- I had no way of judging,
really, so I figured it would be better to err by inclusion. Good thing I
did, since it turns out one of the most frequently asked questions was one
that I initially thought would be too esoteric to warrant inclusion in the
FAQ (slow performance of trn on a slow SLIP connection, when it wants to
download a 300K active file on startup, unless specially configured not to).
It's overdue for a major overhaul, although I've been making minor updates
from time to time. I've got about 3 megs of archived n.s.r posts in which
someone mentions 'trn' to wade through...
Anyway, I installed auto-faq to handle the posting for the trn newsreader
FAQ. Well, I felt it was a shame for that nifty program to be used only a
couple of times a month, and as a frequent visitor to alt.fan.furry and
alt.polyamory, I noticed that various people periodically posted informative
info irregularly. I contacted them and offered to set them up for automatic
periodic posting, and just about everyone took me up on the offer. The furry
FAQs are also available via my Furry FAQs Web page, which has advantages
over the FAQ archives in that any updates are available from my pages
immediately, instead of having to wait until reposting. It was nice to
receive a note the other day from Web surfer who'd found the Furry Novels
List and obtained information about some books he'd been looking for for
ages.
One of the more frequently asked questions on alt.fan.furry was "How do I
connect to FurryMUCK" or "what's the address" ... although included in the
main FAQ, posted biweekly, evidently this bit of info was not reaching its
intended audience. So I whipped up a FAQ on "How to Connect to FurryMUCK
(and elsewhere)" and set it up to post weekly -- with some trepidation that
I'd get flamed for posting it so often. No one's complained, at least not
directly to me, but I imagine it's in most regular readers' killfiles.
The original FurryMUCK FAQ grew, with additions of descriptions of other
furry MU*s, so I decided to split it up into three parts: the connection
tutorial, the list of descriptions, and a concise address chart and schedule
of VR events on the MU*s. The first two parts are crossposted monthly to
rec.games.mud.{tiny,announce} while all three parts are posted weekly to
alt.fan.furry{.muck}. This turns out to be rather high-maintenance, updating
addresses, etc. about three or four times a month. The other furry FAQ
maintainers email me revised versions of their FAQs, and I just strip the
headers and replace the old file for posting.
Generally, I've noticed the theme in many of the responses here: people have
stepped in on their own to fulfil a need, without any "official" discussion
or sanction, and their offerings have mostly been accepted and appreciated
by their newsgroups. What a nice demonstration of cooperative anarchy!
-- New & Improved! The Furry FAQs page! http://web.syr.edu/~pjkappes/furry/ pjkappes@mailbox.syr.edu (Peter Kappesser)
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