Maybe we should consider sending a letter to the news-admin and marketing
groups at suspected sites and see what the response it. Here is a sample
letter I just threw together. Only a strawman...
------------------------
Dear Usenet news-admins,
This letter is being sent on behalf of the Usenet FAQ Maintainers in
an effort to assure FAQs continue to be a valuable resource for your
readership.
It has come to our attention that you have or are changing your
policy when it comes to cross-posting and expiring articles on your
system. As this affects us as the authors of many of the FAQs
posted to Usenet newsgroups, we would appreciate it greatly if you
would take a moment to clarify the changes for us.
1) Propagating crossposted articles
Is there a limit we should be aware of that you consider the point
where you drop an article ? The reason we ask is illustrated in
the following.
There are currently 2513 postings listed in the "List of Periodic
Informational Postings (LoPIP), representing many more actual articles,
since one "posting" may have many parts. The newsgroups-per-posting
breakdown (including all *.answers newsgroups where applicable) is as
follows:
Number of Number of
Newsgroups Postings Percentage
1 455 18%
2 224 9%
3 960 38%
4 299 12%
5 250 10%
6 100 4%
7-10 184 7%
11-26 41 2%
As you can see, a lower level of allowable crossposting, such as 3,
would drop 35% of the FAQs currently being posted. A level of 4
would drop 23% and a level of 5 would drop 13%. These are quite
high numbers of valuable periodic postings to be regularly dropped.
Does your site have a specific limit that we, as authors, may need
to work with to assure your readers are able to benefit from our
documents ?
2) Expiring articles in newsgroups
In the past, articles posted to news.answers have benefited from the
longer expire periods placed on news.answers. Articles crossposted
to that newsgroup normally stayed around longer since the news software
was setup to expire articles based on the longest expiration period.
This allowed readers to benefit from getting many of their questions
answered without creating additional traffic on the net by posting
questions that have been answered.
How does your site expire articles ? Based on the longest or the
shortest expiration period ? Are you keeping news.answers postings
around longer than normal articles ? If not why not ?
We greatly appreciate your taking the time to help us. Our intention
here is simply fact finding. If there are things we need to do to assure
the continued usefulness of our documents, we will consider doing it.
The information you supply will help us greatly in maintaining the value
of the service we are trying to provide to the Usenet/Internet community.
Thank You,
FAQ Authors
FAQ Author Signatories
----------------------
...
Kent Landfield (kent@landfield.com)
...
------------------------
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 The Landfield Group FAX: 1-817-545-7650 Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Please send comp.sources.misc related mail to kent@uunet.uu.net. Search the Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive at http://www.landfield.com/faqs/
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