I don't know the answer, but that won't stop me from speculating. I
suspect the reason is precisely to discourage posting on specific dates
in the month. People being people will tend to choose similar dates,
with a resulting bulge of news. This probably isn't much of an issue
for Usenet as a whole any more (compared with alt.binaries.*, it's a
drop in the bucket). However, the faq server itself could possibly get
bogged down with too much work on some days, and some sites might see
the load.
Yes, we all know we should not post on the first of every month. But the
human mind is a very poor random number generator, and even if asked to
post on random dates, we will still generate clusters. I don't know
what the clusters are in the range of 1-28 -- in the range 1-10 we
would have a mode at 7.
When I started posting my FAQ, I chose to post it on the day of the
month that I was born, figuring this would indeed be a random choice. I
long since changed to posting biweekly, because there are simply too
many sites that don't respect Expires:, with the result that monthly is
too seldom. I set the interval to 13 days, figuring that if it floated
forward a bit it would be about biweekly.
And guess what? After a few months I found that I no longer cared what
day of the month or day of the week it got posted. It posts when it
posts. I update when I update. If I update just after a posting, well,
two weeks isn't too long to wait. (This probably holds for most health
related FAQs; I can understand that some maintainers might want to
coordinate updating and posting more tightly.) So although I understand
the desire to control when your FAQ is posted, I think it's
unnecessary, a waste of your valuable time, and fairly easy to get over.
Edward Reid <edward@paleo.greensboro.fl.us>
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