> On Fri, 30 Jan 1998 09:13:26 -0800 (PST), scs@eskimo.com
> (Steve Summit) wrote:
> > "There are a lot of idiots out there." Right. I guess we have
> > to leave it at that; it's a fact we can't change.
>
> But it would be nice to be able to minimize exposure to them, and I
> think this discussion has been useful for many of us.
> Personally, I have removed all mailto: links on all my web pages,
> and post my FAQ with what I hope looks like "this is an autoresponder
> robot's address". I try to direct all people who want to contact me to
> a web page which states repeatedly that I do not want them to send me
> technical questions, with a link to a "background" page if they don't
> understand why. Still, I get my fair share (but only on the order of
> one message per month, but then my FAQ doesn't go to any "interesting"
> groups).
If you only get one question that you don't want per month, you are
over-invested in defenses already!
> As long as the "stupid" questions (insert usual disclaimers here)
> are relatively far between, I do try to answer them, one way or
> another. I usually manage to bring myself to delete my vitriol about
> how they obviously don't know anything about netiquette, but only
> mostly because I don't like to feel like I'm having an attitude
> problem.
Once you maintain a FAQ you are a public person. To be a public
person and not develop an attitude problem you have to cultivate
the skill of how to say No politely.
> I think it would be nice to have a centralized FAQ about these things,
> too. Granted, there is already a large number of netiquette documents
> out there, but it would seem to me that for the part of the
> net.population who are maintaining FAQs, answers to unsolicited stupid
> questions are frequently needed. Perhaps there could be a short page
> on www.faqs.org we could link to? (It would also feel less imposant to
> simply include a link to something somebody else wrote, instead of
> some diatribe of my own.)
> ... Any volunteers to write one up? I'm not sure I'm eloquent
> enough.
A passive reference document won't reach the population whose
behavior you want to modify. This is one area where email lists
have an edge. When someone enters an email list, they get a
welcome message which gives them an orientation to the scope and
mores of the group. There is no such active behavior by News to
detect the entry of newbies and force some propaganda on them.
It is up to the newbies to self-identify and search out the
newbie briefings.
One process concept to think about is a factored FAQ: keep a
reference document that is passively accessed by ftp, http,
etc. but never curculated as News; and a Periodic Posting which
containts the summary and intro and what's new, and covers both
static issues such as topic scope and sources of standard
knowledge in that domain as well as group process norms
(a.k.a. netiquette).
Probably the best single opportunity to get a global policy
followed is to infiltrate the "newusers" propaganda stream with
the algorithm
Check the FAQ before you ask the Newsgroup.
Ask the Newsgroup if that didn't answer your question.
The backup document or expansion paragraph can say
"The knowledge collected in the FAQ for a Newsgroup is not the
product of one person's wisdom, it is the product of the group
discussion process. If it isn't answered in the FAQ, the FAQ
maintainer probably doesn't know or at least you should give your
question exposure to multiple people who might know the answer
and not impose on an individual.
"People who have invested their personal time and effort in
maintaining the FAQs are highly invested in this group process.
They are on the whole _less_ interested that the random contact
you make on the 'Net in being asked questions privately (off the
Newsgroup)."
I don't think you will succeed in writing one statement that
suits the policy preferences of all maintainters. You as an
individual need to take responsibility for asserting the limits
or rules of engagement that you will accept as friendly behavior
by others.
One of the most creative, customer-friendly practices I have seen
was somebody at National Public Radio fixed their email
auto-responder so that the auto-response included a frequently-
updated Top Ten FAQs in the auto-response. Here the background
is not Net News but a question-answering service. The FAQ is not
there to say "don't ask" but rather "Just in case this is your
question, here is the answer quickly. If the answer isn't here,
please check (the big FAQ document if it exists). The time you
invest in reading there will save us time so we can focus on the
questions for which there aren't good written answers in obvious
places. Thanks."
Al Gilman
-- neglecter of http://www.access.digex.net/~asgilman/lynx/FAQ