Re: Archive: line

---------

Danny R. Faught (faught@zeppelin.convex.com)
Fri, 9 May 1997 08:26:57 -0500 (CDT)


John D. Verne wrote:
> While updating a "how to find the FAQ" document that gets posted to my
> home newsgroup, I included a reference to "rtfm.mit.edu" -- to my
> surprise, I learned that FAQs are named from the FAQ's "Subject:" line...
>
> Who or what references the "Archive:" line?

Look in /pub/usenet/news.answers. There you'll find a (rather wide)
directory hierarchy based on archive name. I suppose it's more
user-friendly to make it easier to find FAQs by newsgroup and subject,
but I wish the archive name hierarchy weren't hidden so well.

I've also noticed that the mirror sites I tend to try don't have the
archive name setup at all. This is annoying, because sometimes I look
for outdated FAQs and find them under the archive name but not the
newsgroup directories.

> I've also managed to get multiple copies archived at rtfm, on account of
> my making minor changes to this subject. I thought I was safe, and that
> this info wasn't supposed to be static.
>
> I was attempting to make the subject line clearer, if it was cut short (as
> many news readers seem to do).

See the news-answers/postapproval-guidelines FAQ. This is one of the
changes you have to tell the rtfm folks about. Maybe the archive
software should have noticed that there was another file with the same
archive name out there, though.