I am not a faq maintainer, (nor do I play one on TV 8-}) but like
many other folks I believe that the netnews faq are by far the
best source of information on the net. In fact at one time I
thought of trying to do a similar thing on my own. I soon learned
the difficulties of try to persuade faq maintainers to grant permission.
While I never did persue the idea the basis for my product was going
to be a search engine that would allow the user to look for information
in all of the faqs. This turns out to be very useful for people unfamiliar
with the netnews (dis)organization. 8-}
A simple example is that I once was looking for the specs on an IBM 3480
tape drive. While a search of all the news groups did not turn up the
info I happened to know that comp.arch.storage was the most likely
place. There was an excellent explaination there. The point was that
search the faqs would have been the only solution for some. BTW a
net search turned up vendors but no useful info.
Back to the subject. Two points that may or may not be of interest.
1) Compiled text for search may not need permision to be included
2) A low cost quarterly update of the faqs ($5 maybe) might be
worth while for people.
Just my $0.02 worth
mjr
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