Emphasis on *locally*, please. Other ISPs have widely differing exp times.
> For a FAQ posted weekly, this means
> that at any given time a user has about a 50% chance of finding the FAQ in
> his/her newsfeed.
This is widely disconcerning when you realize that the rtfm.mit.edu
moderation team recommends that FAQs only be posted once a month. What
newsgroup sees FAQs posted *weekly*?
> Of course, your milage may vary, but I find this an
> acceptable outcome. Besides, how many people grep news.answers for FAQs
> anyway - there are something like 4000 there on a regular basis.
I peruse news.answers periodically and discover wonderful FAQs just by
browsing. I liken it to browsing through the stacks of a large library
(vs. finding the call number and hunting for it directly).
> I'm of the opinion (and
> I'm sure people here will disagree) that if your posting something to more
> than a certain number of groups, it needs to be more tailored or your
> selection of groups needs to be more certain.
We are required by the rtfm mod team to include news.answers *and*
*.answers (rec.answers, alt.answers, soc.answers, etc.). We are also
required by the rtfm mod team to post the FAQ to the original newsgroup
it was intended. That's already a total of three. With a threshold of
four newsgroups, what happens to the FAQ that deserves posting to two
more newsgroups? Some newsgroup subhierarchies (e.g. rec.scuba.*,
rec.arts.disney.*, rec.travel.*), even with discrimination, would easily
be able to have more than four crossposts and have the post not be a
spam. I for one, post the Travelite FAQ, which is posted to the
bare-bones four newsgroups (and I could easily add more, but I don't).
> Personally, I would like to see a rethinking of the whole news.answers
> concept - perhaps a bot could keep FAQs current in the *answers groups or
> something.
I'll leave this one for one of the moderators to respond to, but it
seems to me rather dangerous to change long-standing procedures/policies
because of an ISP's new decisions. What's wrong with the way it's already
done? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There are thousands of individuals
who post the FAQs and to get them all to change will be a major undertaking.
> >What bothers me most about the situation is that the admins seem to think
> >that *most* sites are implementing policies like this, or soon will.
> >Apparently these ideas are fairly generally accepted in the news.admin
> >newsgroups (which I have not kept up on for a long time).
>
> It's about stinkin time. Crossposted dreck is nearly on par with
> unsolicited commercial posting on my ire scale.
Why are we throwing out the baby with the bath water?
> It's hard to have them correct their action without a 15 minute explanation
> about nettiquette and how Usenet works.
Seems to me the ISPs are partially responsible for educating their
newbies. Imposing technical exp times seems to me an easy out for the
ISPs, not to mention lazy.
> >So, if you think that well-run sites are likely to be keeping FAQs around
> >for the stated expiration interval, think again. One-day expiration may
> >soon be the norm.
>
> Naaaah. That's too short for me to go away on Friday, come back on Monday
> and see what I missed. I don't think it'll get any lower than 3 days
> without a lot of complaining.
Don't be so sure. Any FAQ posted to an alt.binaries.pictures.* newsgroup
is likely to be expired in three *HOURS*, not days.
*****Email advertisers: put me on your "don't call, don't email" list.*****
Mama Lani <lani@lava.net> Tattoo FAQ Maintainer, http://www.lava.net/~lani/
>> Celebrating the grand opening (pun intended) of "The RABbit Hole: The <<
>> Official Home Page of rec.arts.bodyart" at http://www.eskimo.com/~rab <<
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