Um, mine? And some users complain that half a week isn't enough. We
argued abut the guideline in the newsgroup and thought a week was
sufficient.
>> 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).
When I want to know something in the library, I prefer to walk straight to
it. Wandering is for people who have time and broad interests - and the
people who would go look for a FAQ are interested in answers, generally
right away. BTW, few enough people read the FAQs anyway (my impression)
that I don't want to make it difficult to find if some soul should actually
want to peruse it.
>> 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?
There is one baby in 3.4 million gallons of water. This is the proportion
of the spam problem Usenet faces. Break down and bend on some FAQ policy
to save Usenet, please.
>> 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.
Well if that's the case, why have FAQs at all. That's a pretty
pie-in-the-sky proposition, holding ISPs liable for the education of their
newbies.
T
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Home: tlawson@amug.org Todd C. Lawson, Tempe, AZ, USA
School: tlawson@asu.edu "The journey of a thousand miles
Work: tlawson@archnemesys.com begins with one step." - JFK
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