1. The RTFM archives are apparently currently created by taking postings from
the *.answers news feed. At one time this was probably the best guarantor
of current-ness, as well as easiest for FAQ maintainers.
2. Things are starting to get a bit creaky, e.g.
- spammers can occasionally mangle the archives
- half or more of my time as *.answers moderator is taken up with
"maintenance" like deleting bogus FAQ submissions (ie postings to
*.answers that aren't FAQs and aren't recognized by the current filters)
- increasingly often, FAQ writers are keeping web-only versions and thus
not posting, so rtfm and it's echoes aren't quite the repositories they
used to be.
3. To avoid confusing the existing software and mirrors, which expect to find
textual USENET postings, we'd probably need yet another set of directories
for holding HTML faqs. I dunno how the actual rtfm maintainers would
react to this; I don't know them or their environment very well [*.answers
moderators are essentially guests at rtfm]
4. The bunch-of-new-directories approach strikes me as a short-term one;
perhaps with the new millenium approaching we need to rethink the whole
issue of how FAQs are handled. I have *some* software development time
available this year, and Pam also might later in the year, but we all need
to think through what the *right* approach would be.
If anyone else has any further thoughts, feel free to make suggestions.
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