BTW, something to tell you. About two or three weeks ago, the Netcom
news server experienced a crash, and it was not fixed in two or three
days. Eventually Netcom has to switch the shell account news server
to the Netcruiser server. Because the two servers use different
numbering systems, Netcom wrote a Perl script to help us mark all posts
as "unread" so we shell account users won't miss any posts (at the cost
of reading something again). They also said that some newsgroups would
be lost in this process and we users can notify them to set up new ones.
Is this related to the alleged expiration policy change? I don't know.
(1) Currently the SCT FAQ is crossposted in "news.answers", "soc.answers"
and SCT only, so this is not a problem for me. Is there anyone trying
to talk to Netcom administration about the alleged new policy? At least
I was not aware of it and Netcom did not explicitly put it in
/etc/motd.
(2) For me, I post the FAQ of SCT monthly, then post a notice about the
HTML document also monthly but two weeks away from the FAQ posting.
Both of them form a biweekly posting. The FAQ posting is crossposted
to the "*.answers" groups while the notice is done in SCT only. I
also put the URL in my signature when I post in SCT. In this way I
believe most people won't have too much trouble IF they do need SCT
FAQ. In this way it does not matter how long Netcom expires posts.
(3) Some FAQ maintainers have already pointed out that this could be a
local problem. Suppose today for whatever reasons Netcom expires and
purges my FAQ posts in 3 hours while news servers all over the world
expires them in 10 days. In this case the only people being affected
are the Netcom users. Please note that
Netcom expires and purges an FAQ posts !=
Netcom issues a cancel so all copies of the FAQ are also removed
at other servers.
(4) Is it possible that eventually "news.answers" will become nothing but
a gateway to "rtfm.mit.edu"? I once read "news.answers" and I do find
many interesting FAQ files there. However, about two or three months
later I dropped. Because for topics I am interested in, there are just
too many files and I cannot finish reading them in time. On the other
hand, the FAQ files are not modified significantly, so roughly in two
months they start to repeat.
For a newbie who wants to know something about Taiwan, do you think he/she
would wait in "news.answers" for an expectation of 12 days (assuming
a monthly posting of FAQ, and the documents stay there for one week
before being expired and purged, so he perhaps does not need to wait
at all, or he has to wait for 31-7=24 days if he is unlucky) for the
FAQ, or he/she would directly lauch Yahoo or Infoseek to find it?
Disclaimer: I don't own Netcom stocks......
====================================================
> BTW, it should be clear that if netcom is the only site instituting
> policies like this, then it's a local problem. What I'm concerned
> about is their newsadmins' attitude that "everyone is doing it".
> (Indeed, they apparently did not write the expire patches that they're
> installing, but got them from somewhere else.) If that's true, it
> requires an entirely different sort of response.
>
> The first question I'd like to answer is whether anyone has heard of
> other sites making similar changes. Also, does anyone here read
> the news.admin.* groups regularly? Have such changes been discussed
> and widely approved of there?
>
> regards, tom lane
>
Tung-chiang Yang tcyang@netcom.com
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