[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]
Jonathan Cunningham writes:
> Date: 3 Apr 2000 15:33:53 GMT
>
> A suggestion to the gods of pop-forum:
There aint any. Just a bunch of slaves fitting in odd minutes here
and there....
> Many newsgroups and mailing lists regularly post
> the FAQ for the group (typically once per month).
> Even when the FAQ is long. This is usually done
> automatically (easy enough to do, with cron or
> whatever). This is a Good Thing.
Agreed. If anyone reading this knows how to set up a FAQ mechanism
I am sure that the effort would be appreciated.
One approximation to a FAQ is a hastily written file I put on the
free poplog web/ftp site several months ago.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/comp.lang.pop.newsgroup
which includes this:
See also the FAQ assembled by Steve Leach:
http://www.poplog.org/about/faq-list.html
(I think that should be: Steve Leach and Graham Higgins.)
I think I simply cobbled together various bits and pieces of
existing text.
I have no idea how suitable my file is is for the purpose. I'd be
very happy for someone else to take it over and do what's needed.
I've been reluctant to post it regularly to comp.lang.pop because
it would then go to people on pop-forum who would get annoyed
at the repetition.
However, I think I now know how to post it to comp.lang.pop without
having it forwarded, which I'll do immediately after posting this.
> Most newsreaders
> and mail reading programs can be set to automatically
> discard the FAQ, so it needn't bother regular
> readers. (Any decent mail program will even let you
> discard it before downloading, if you have a dial-up
> connection and are worried about the extra few seconds
> to download a short FAQ once a month. Although one
> must be concerned that, even if the mail program
> is decent, the mail reader (human) is indecent, and
> may not know how to tell their mail program to do this.)
Yup. And many people have a mail file managed on a departmental
machine where quotas can cause problems, etc.
> In case of concerns about being a nuisance, a
> compromise is to regularly mail a short message
> saying from where the FAQ can be ftp-ed (or the
> web address of a web version of the FAQ).
That could be done, but I don't know the best mechanism for
automating this (just cron and inews?), and having the FAQ properly
registered, or whatever the term is, by the gods of usenet.
> Minimal suggestion:
> Someone (Steve Leach or Aaron?) should take
> responsibility for posting regularly (e.g. once
> per month) a short message giving the minimal
> pointers for locating a pop-forum or poplog FAQ.
The bigger job is managing the contents of the FAQ.
We need someone to look after it. I am too busy, and I
suspect Steve is too.
> Regularly posting this information is particularly
> important if the FAQ is not where you expect to
> find it (e.g. at www.faqs.org ).
So, how does it get put there, and would anyone
like to do that?
> Of course, if my suggested questions can't be
> answered by going back through the past year(s)
> of pop-forum discussion, then they are clearly
> not frequent questions!
Just for information, comp.lang.pop postings are now
archived at
www.poplog.org
i.e. in
http://www.poplog.org/talk/
Must sleep now....
Aaron
|