Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org> writes:
>
> I don't know that I've seen a case where, IN GENERAL, newbies to the
> newsgroups had a clue about how to use newsgroups or FAQs. That is,
> in general, a fall out of making usenet 'user friendly' for everyone's
> mom/grandma/baby/pet ... As the task became so overwhelming that the
> number of volunteers were vastly outweighted by the volume, it became
> obvious, to me, that it was time to pull down the shades, lock the door,
> and move on down the road...
I'm not to that point; the approach I came up with was
to buy Usenet....
Or, at least a decent chunk of the domain-space that maps
to Usenet, with the idea of pasting that kind of information
("what is Usenet and how do you (and should you) use it"
through "here's the FAQ for this group") on the top of a
web-based news interface, with three basic goals in mind:
1) Make Usenet more useful for a new or inexperienced
trying to use it for research or educational purposes
2) Make new or inexperienced users more useful (or at
least less problematic) for Usenet
3) Prevent someone else from snapping them up for
commercial use.
Where things have stalled is on the same issues that we're
dealing with on other fronts, namely the lack of volunteer
availability. My time's been far more limited than I'd planned
for, over the past two years in particular, and I've gone
through a series of volunteers who have gotten bogged down
with the scope of the tasks involved.
I do think the idea is a valid one--even with only a partial
setup in place and very limited content, people do type
the newsgroup names into their browser address fields
every minute or so, which suggests that a more useful and
content-filled system would get considerable usage.
I just got off the phone with the main programmer who
has been working on the project for the last year (and
coping with chronic illness through most of that time)
and suggested that it's far enough behind schedule that
I need to solicit more volunteers to help with the project.
If we are going to be rethinking the processes that go on
behind FAQ approval, distribution, and maintenance, I'd
like to see further development on 1reader mesh with
that, and aid it if at all possible. If some perl wonks and
other sysadminly/web developer types would care to
volunteer to help out, or if any of this would help with
the other problems with FAQ system, we can go into
more details on the subject.
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