> Some of those people fail to update it, and the unupdated copy fills
> up with dead links.
A while ago, I realized I was wasting energy tracking down obsolete
copies when I could just put links to faqs.org and rtfm at the top
of my copy -- which I have done to all my FAQs now.
Now I only have to find those very few that might still not have the
link, and ask them to update one last time.
> So I've added a text at the top of the FAQ asking people not to create
> copies of the FAQ on the web, with a short explanation.
Replace it with the link -- it takes the same amount of effort, but is
directly useful.
> why is it that some idiots create broken copies
> of pages and fail to update it ?
I can think of two very obvious cases:
1. where it's used in a course (my comp.lang.awk FAQ was) and the
school desires internal links where it can; this can be rather
commendable if their goal is to reduce traffic load on free net
services by their (paying) students.
2. where network access is very expensive; if I were operating a
very pay-per-byte ISP, I would certainly encourage everyone to use
the copy of the FAQs I grabbed off of a CD instead of going
live to the archive sites every time.
> I know I cant prevent people from taking the article straight out of
> the NNTP spool with a news-reader or the HTML right off a site with
> any plain old browser,
Exactly. Don't attempt the impossible; just give them a link back.
-- Russell_Schulz@locutus.ofB.ORG Shad 86c
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