Long ago in a network far eclipsed by the capabilities of today,
there existed an infrastructure that was totally disjoint, that
was exclusively text based and was mainly connected via very slow
modems. Direct leased lines of 56K were fast and were almost only
available to large companies. Much of the data that flowed from site
to site did so by directly connecting to a fellow UUCP node and
batching a large quantity of traffic "up/down" stream. Usenet
in 1991 saw 20meg a day of message traffic. Usenet was/is a valuable
resource that allowed for a "one to many" means of posting information,
asking questions, etc. Usenet was growing in popularity rapidly.
The traffic was increasing at an alarming pace considering the
extremely slow transport media. Usenet Admins were debating publically
at what point the level of traffic would exceed the modem capabilities
of the day.
As new people discovered Usenet, the same questions were being asked
over and over. There was little way for a newbie to learn about Usenet
and it's various newsgroups beyond the periodic posting to
news.announce.newusers. Some of the moderated groups, such as the
comp.sources.* newsgroups, had periodic postings that described how
the moderator liked to do business, but beyond that there was little
other way for someone to find out something without posting a question.
It was frustrating to those who had been on Usenet for many years. New
people, more traffic and lots of the same old questions... There was a
great deal of flaming that went on from time to time over the
resurrection of a topic that the newgroup readership had just discussed
at length and come to some sort of conclusion on. There was no place
where these things were documented. Slowly but surely certain people
took it upon themselves to put the commonly asked newbie questions into
separate postings that they pulled out when the same questions popped up
again. People even started to post their answer lists on a somewhat
regular basis. While this helped, it was done on a very spotty basis
and there was no consistency across postings.
At the summer Usenix in 1991 a few people talked about the problem
of noise generated in the newsgroups by people asking the same
questions over and over. Jonathan Kamens decided to take it the
next step after our talks. Jonathan came up with the idea of
having a newsgroup where there would be a single group where
every "FAQ" could be posted. Below is the control message that
created the moderated news.answers newsgroup.
------------------------------------------------------------
Control: newgroup news.answers moderated
Newsgroups: news.answers.ctl
Path: rpi!tale
From: tale@rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Subject: newgroup news.answers moderated
Message-ID: <x8tny1q@rpi.edu>
Sender: tale@cs.rpi.edu
Nntp-Posting-Host: cs.rpi.edu
Date: 23 Sep 91 12:40:31 GMT
Approved: tale@rpi.edu
Lines: 34
news.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for creation
by 337:19 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 17 September 1991.
Group submission address: news-answers@mit.edu
Moderator contact address: news-answers-request@mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
For your newsgroups file:
news.answers Repository for periodic USENET articles. (Moderated)
The charter, culled from the call for votes:
The news.answers newsgroup will serve as a repository in which
periodic informational postings (a.k.a "Frequently Asked
Questions" postings, or "FAQs") from other newsgroups will be
posted.
Although it's difficult to say exactly what qualifies as an
FAQ that belongs in news.answers, the basic description is,
"any posting which answers common questions and is meant to be
read by humans belongs." Furthermore, FAQs cross-posted in
news.answers should have meaningful subject lines. For
example, an FAQ for rec.chess should have a subject line
saying something like "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about
chess," rather than just "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)."
For example, the comp.unix.questions "Frequently Asked
Questions about Unix - with Answers [Monthly posting]" and the
news.announce.newusers "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions
on Netiquette" would belong, as would the README file from
comp.mail.maps. However, the comp.mail.maps map postings and
the readership statistics from news.lists would not.
Where there is an ambiguity, the moderator will decide whether
or not a posting belongs in the newsgroup.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The idea took off. Jonathan was attending MIT at the time and set a
system up there as rtfm.mit.edu. When Jonathan left upon graduating,
MIT was kind enough to leave the archive in place and to support it as
best they could. But that's getting a bit ahead of things...
It then became apparent that it would be nice if there was some way to
link the FAQs to the top level hierarchy that it appeared in. In December
of 1992 there was a vote to create additional *.answers newsgroups based
on the Big 7. The idea was an extension of the original. All FAQs posted
to a newsgroup in the comp.* hierarchy (for example) would be crossposted
to news.answers and comp.answers as well as to the newsgroup the FAQ was
intended for. The results of the voting appears below for each of the
Big 7 *.answers newsgroups.
comp.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for
creation by 258:27 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 7 Jan 1993.
misc.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for
creation by 246:28 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 7 Jan 1993.
rec.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for
creation by 241:31 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 7 Jan 1993.
sci.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for
creation by 251:27 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 7 Jan 1993.
soc.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for
creation by 240:29 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 7 Jan 1993.
talk.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for
creation by 232:35 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 7 Jan 1993.
Then, when the humanities hierarchy was created in 1995, an associated
*.answers was voted on and passed.
humanities.answers is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for
creation by 164:22 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 19 Jul 1995.
As the idea of FAQs started to become the norm so did the number of ftp
archives that housed them. It was apparent that many site admins liked
having immediate access to that much content, that many answers. Many
admins kept them around so they could appear as johnny/janey-on-the-spot
when asked a question. Many wanted to provide them to their users so they
"didn't" get bothered with "stupid" questions. Whatever the local reasons,
*.answers archives where everywhere.
As the web started to take off, Thomas A. Fine created what is considered
the web's first hyperlinked FAQ archive at Ohio State University at
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/FAQ-List.html
This became a popular resource as Mosaic began to appear on people's
desktops. Many of the FAQ authors began to list this site as a place
to go in their FAQs. When Thomas left OSU the facility was left on
autopilot. After a period of time authors began complaining about how
frequently things were getting updated, or that old FAQ were never being
removed. There was an attempt by Thomas to set it up on another,
non-university system but the project was never finished. The OSU site
was going downhill in usefulness and bad blood was becoming apparent in
the author and user communities.
At that point I decided to see if I could recreate a useful site that
did not have some of the problems that the OSU site had. In doing so
I created my own set of new problems, though most were internal and not
externally apparent to the Usenet community at large. (Thank goodness. ;))
I started developing the site in August of 1996 and put it up officially
in early October of 1996. The software went a step further than the OSU
software as it tried to convert all URLs as well as email addresses and
ftp sites listed in older, non-url formats.
The site used an exact mirror of the rtfm.mit.edu news.answers archive
as its input. This made it easy to correct archive problems. If the
problem existed on landfield.com/faqs, it also existed on rtfm. Correcting
it on RTFM meant it was corrected in the next daily regeneration of the
hyperlinked archive on landfield.com. Later I wanted to assure the
archive was not seen simply as a 'landfield' resource. I wanted it to
take on a life of its own so that if it was moved to another system or
systems it would not cause major problems. At that point I got the
domain faqs.org and asked people who were referencing landfield.com/faqs
to change their references to www.faqs.org/. I also extended it to be a
better resource for those that write the FAQs by putting up weblint
gateways, link verification programs and a web interface to the email-base
faq-server at rtfm.mit.edu. The archive has been a major success. What
started out at maybe a thousand "hits" a month (graphics and pages
counted individually) has now blossomed into over 3,000,000 "pages"
a month (counting only pages).
Throughout the past there has been a process in place for getting
FAQs approved. This was setup and managed by the moderators of the
news.answers newsgroup. The moderators have put in countless hours
trying to keep the process going by dealing with the ton of mail that
news.answers caused. They have also had to deal with updating their
own set of administrative FAQs, while managing the rtfm.mit.edu archive
and verifying new or modified submissions to the various *.answers
newsgroup. This was supposed to be a group of volunteers but quite
often found itself on the back of one or two people. While the FAQ
process has been a success, it has been so because of the contributions
of the authors and even more so, the volunteers that run the process.
To all who have brought us this far... Thanks.
Now it is time to evaluate where we are and how we can go about
improving the process. We need to look at expanding the FAQ process
to a wider audience/community while giving the authors options that
were not possible in the past.
----
Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502
Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent@nfr.net http://www.nfr.net/
Search the Usenet FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/
Search the RFC/FYI/STD/BCP Archive at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Email: kent@nfr.net http://www.nfr.net/ Please send comp.sources.misc related mail to kent@landfield.com Search the Usenet FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ Search the RFC/FYI/STD/BCP Archive at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/
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