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Re: [faq-maintainers] Need to "change the rules"...

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>From: Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com>
>
>Another set of "rules" that we might consider changing are the
>ones that suggest/require that news.answers-approved FAQ lists
>be crossposted (and to as many .answers newsgroups) the way they
>are now.

According to the RFD at

http://www.landfield.com/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/news/news.answers-expansion

the original motivation(s) for sci.answers, soc.answers, etc. were

1. news.answers is too large for some sites to carry
2. news.answers is too large even to be browsed cover-to-cover
3. some sites object to receiving "offensive" articles in the mix
4. moderation is too burdensome

Of these, I suggest that only #3 continues to be as relevant as it
was in 1992. news.answers may be large, but disks and bandwidth are
much cheaper now. With the growth of web archival and searching, I
doubt many people even try to browse any *.answers group (with the
possible exception of FAQ geeks like us who probably look at all of
news.answers anyway :). Moderation is certainly still burdensome,
but adding more *.answers groups hasn't eased it the way Jon [Kamens,
the first news.answers proponent and moderator] hoped it would.

Furthermore, with most Usenet service outsourced and news admins
harder to track down, I suspect that it's much less common now for
sites to pick and choose which newsgroups they receive.

In short, I don't see any pressing need for *.answers, apart from
news.answers, and removing the other groups would both help FAQs
propagate past the filters that are becoming increasingly commonplace
and make the moderators' jobs slightly easier.

- Pam Greene
member of the *.answers moderation team, 1993-1998 or so?

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