The first thing that come to mind was to establish a "standard" that if
someone were to post a pointer to an FAQ, rather than their FAQ that they
be told to append "pointers" to the archive name.. Thus if their FAQ had
an archive name of rec/sports/foo they would use an archive name of
pointers/rec/sports/foo when they posted the "the FAQ for the group can be
found at www.playfoo.org/faq" message. All the rest of the headers would
be the same as for a normal FAQ posting, including the approval lines.
The effect would be that the text version of the actual FAQ would not be
overwritten by the pointer posting, but instead the pointer messages would
end up in the archive on a "pointers" sub-directory, where they would be
"out of the way".
The idea behind this idea is that several maintainers have indicated a
desire to only post the body of the FAQ occasionally, yet feel that the
pointer should go out more often. For example the main FAQ may only be
updated every few months, but the pointer may have to go out twice a week
to be visible to users in the modern world of Usenet with its need to have
short retention schedules.
It would seem to me that this scheme "should" have an minimal impact on the
existing archive sites, but I of course have no way of knowing for sure.
Naturally the archive program might be modified to take advantage of this
convention, for example if the FAQ has not been posted in a year, but the
pointer is still going out, it is likely that the text version is still
valid, and so it would not be subject to a clean-up action.
The second crazy idea that has been going around in my head, would be at
add a "Pointer:" header line to the auxiliary header. Here the idea would
be to specify how an archive site is to deal with the URL line. some
possibilities are:
Pointer: true
The FAQ is at the URL specified and the archive sites may wish to have a
link.
Pointer: false
The URL is only a related site, and so the archive sites should not cite it
as an alternative place to get the FAQ.
Pointer: mirror
The archive site has permission to create/maintain a mirror of the FAQ from
the URL on a server at the archive site.
Pointer: exclusive
The archive site should only make the URL available and not provide the
text (or a converted copy) of the posting ... This would be for those FAQs
that change day by day and so the text copies are always
out of date.
I am sure that there are other conditions that would use different keyword,
and perhaps the values used would be some sort of "code" to attempt to
confuse spacers.
Note that the archive sites would take into account the "pointers/" in
the archive name to decide where they would put the links to the URLs in
the postings. In other words in the previous example the URL would be
referenced under rec/sports/foo and not under pointers/rec/sports/foo on
the archive site.
Note that if there was a way to MAIL the posting to the master site, a
remote archive site could collect a list of URLs of FAQs from the headers
in the archive, and thus by-pass Usenet, other than in getting the FAQ
"approved" in the first place. This opens up the "social" can of worms
that I was talking about in an earlier post.
As I say, I am no expert on the inner working of the archive site, so this
idea may blow up all sorts of software, but I am offering it to further
discussion. As always this has nothing to do with my work.
Charles MacDonald - Information Management
<My own Opinion unless otherwise credited>
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