> could one of these sites in the path be dropping
> articles for some reason? I'd bet that Sprint would be sensitive to a
> large posting like this... could the Win95 FAQ be exceeding the BI?
The fourteen parts now at rtfm, archived on five different days
between Jan 8 and Mar 2, have nine different Path: headers, so if some
site is dropping articles, it might not be one of those in the Path:
of an article that made it through.
According to the Net Abuse FAQ :),
BI is defined as the sum of the square roots of how many
newsgroups each article was posted to. If that number approaches
20, then the posts will probably be cancelled by somebody.
Since FAQs are cross-posted, not multi-posted, they'd have to have a
*lot* of newsgroups to exceed BI=20. Of course, there's no guarantee
that sites are using BI>20, or indeed BI at all, as opposed to some
more draconian metric.
If anyone is interested in looking into this problem further, perhaps
figuring out which site (if any) is squelching FAQs, I'd be only too
glad to try to get 'em to implement a more flexible policy.
We had a brief discussion which may be relevant around the beginning
of Febraury, 1997, in which I mentioned that fully 11% of postings
approved for *.answers were cross-posted to 7 or more newsgroups. See
the archives at
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faq-maintainers/faq-maintainers.9702.1
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faq-maintainers/faq-maintainers.9702.2
- Pam
still a *.answers moderator