Yes, this is most of the explanation. The first time I
looked, I missed the fact that Craig was linking to the
newsgroup hierarchy on rtfm rather than the FAQ hierarchy
on rtfm. Craig, the most reliable link to rtfm for your FAQ
is
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/cultures/scottish/scottish-faq
which still holds the FAQ as of this afternoon.
See the news.answers at
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/news-answers/guidelines
As the guidelines explain,
Your posting will be archived in several different places
at rtfm.mit.edu, but the most stable one is derived from
your archive name: /pub/faqs/ARCHIVE-NAME
Later, the guidelines say
As noted above, the software which builds the periodic
informational postings archive on rtfm.mit.edu
automatically uses the "Archive-name:" line for a
posting's file name, when saving it in any newsgroup
ending in ".answers" (news.answers, rec.aviation.answers,
etc.).
And indeed the Scottish FAQ is also correctly archived at
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/cultures/scottish/scottish-faq
The final spec in the guidelines is
In other archive locations, the file name is
usually derived from the posting's Subject.
If you want the FAQ stored under the same archive name in
both the faqs hierarchy and the newsgroups hierarchy, you
should add a auxiliary header of the form
Soc-culture-scottish-archive-name: scottish-faq
So why did Craig's posting show up in the newsgroup
hierarchy? It has to do with the fact that rtfm will
archive any posting in the LoPIP (List of Periodic
Informational Postings), even if it is not posted to any
*.answers newsgroups, or approved for such posting:
Even if you don't want to submit your posting for
*.answers at this time, we would be glad to add it to the
LoPIP. [...] All posts listed in the LoPIP are archived
at rtfm.mit.edu whether or not they are cross-posted to
*.answers.
So here's what seems to have happened:
1) Craig posted to the newsgroup, using the Subject line
of the approved FAQ posting.
2) The archiver noticed that the newsgroup, subject, and
(I presume) poster matched an entry in the LoPIP.
3) The archiver found no archive-name auxiliary header, so
it did not store the posting in the faqs hierarchy, nor in
the news.answers newsgroup hierarchy.
4) The archiver found no newsgroup-archive-name auxiliary
header, so it stored it in the newsgroup hierarchy using a
name derived from the subject line.
Thus the archiver is Working As Documented. This response
is known in some circles as a WAD. At least, it's WAD
with a few assumptions which I made above. This is
essentially a consequence of the attempt to archive all
PIPs, with minimal effort and organization on the
poster's part. The poster need only send a copy of the
headers to the archive maintainers.
Whether there's a better way is debatable. The archiver
could check whether a posting in the LoPIP is approved
for *.answers, and archive it only if it is actually so
posted. I would question whether this is worth the
effort.
The lessons I think we should take from this are
1) link to the copy in the faqs hierarchy (as the
guidelines recommend), not the newsgroups hierarchy.
2) don't re-use your FAQ subject lines.
Edward Reid
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