The guidelines have always discouraged posting on the first
of the month, to avoid a flood at that time.
Here's what I wrote in response to a similar comment a few
years ago.
To: FAQ-Maintainers@consensus.com
Subject: Re: posting on specific dates
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 96 13:39:48 -0400
> is there any reason why I cannot give the FAQ
> server a date or dates in the month for posting?
I don't know the answer, but that won't stop me from
speculating. I suspect the reason is precisely to
discourage posting on specific dates in the month. People
being people will tend to choose similar dates, with a
resulting bulge of news. This probably isn't much of an
issue for Usenet as a whole any more (compared with
alt.binaries.*, it's a drop in the bucket). However, the
faq server itself could possibly get bogged down with too
much work on some days, and some sites might see the load.
Yes, we all know we should not post on the first of every
month. But the human mind is a very poor random number
generator, and even if asked to post on random dates, we
will still generate clusters. I don't know what the
clusters are in the range of 1-28 -- in the range 1-10 we
would have a mode at 7.
When I started posting my FAQ, I chose to post it on the
day of the month that I was born, figuring this would
indeed be a random choice. I long since changed to posting
biweekly, because there are simply too many sites that
don't respect Expires:, with the result that monthly is too
seldom. I set the interval to 13 days, figuring that if it
floated forward a bit it would be about biweekly.
And guess what? After a few months I found that I no longer
cared what day of the month or day of the week it got
posted. It posts when it posts. I update when I update. If
I update just after a posting, well, two weeks isn't too
long to wait. (This probably holds for most health related
FAQs; I can understand that some maintainers might want to
coordinate updating and posting more tightly.) So although
I understand the desire to control when your FAQ is posted,
I think it's unnecessary, a waste of your valuable time,
and fairly easy to get over.
Edward Reid
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