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Date:Mon Apr 4 03:16:24 2000 
Subject:Re: pop-forum FAQ, where is it? 
From:gjh-junk 
Volume-ID:1000404.03 

>  > Many newsgroups and mailing lists regularly post
>  > the FAQ for the group (typically once per month).
>  > 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.

At the moment, I'm up to my neck in alligators (or, more precisely, 
kernel/swap problems with the server) but I have a marker down for a 
"contributive" FAQ on the poplog.org website via FAQ-O-Matic. I'm not 
sure that FAQ-O-Matic is the right solution and I have a couple of 
others on the boil - but I have a sneaking suspicion that I ought to 
cut to the chase and do it in XML (time to exercise Steve's owl/wow 
code).

>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

Unfortunately, that link on the poplog.org website was ineffective in 
that it simply reloaded the page. I have arranged for the page to 
include Aaron's approximation (referred to above) and termed the 
whole thing a "proto-FAQ". I have also changed the link to point to:

http://www.poplog.org/faq

>(I think that should be: Steve Leach and Graham Higgins.)

No, I perpetrated that ineffective link, all on my ownsome.

>  > Someone (Steve Leach or Aaron?) should take
>  > responsibility for posting regularly

I don't have access to an email-to-news gateway, otherwise I'd do that.

>  > 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?

www.faq.org says ...

>>How can I get my FAQ to appear in the archive
>>
>>This archive is updated automatically from a local ftp mirror of 
>>the master FAQ archive site at MIT. If your FAQ is distributed via 
>>the news.answers newsgroup then it will automatically appear in 
>>this archive.

and, on another page, reports of the *.answers groups ...

>>A periodic posting maintainer who wants his or her posting(s) to
>>appear in news.answers (and other *.answers newsgroups) submits it to
>>the moderators, following the guidelines in the "*.answers submission
>>guidelines" article for proper submission and format of the posting's
>>headers.

I chased down some of their recommended links for writing and 
formatting FAQs - only to find myself back on my own server, looking 
at an out-of-date FAQ about writing FAQs - for which I am the 
maintainer (sigh). I accept this synchronicity with due fatalism and 
offer to take responsibility for maintaining the Popforum FAQ.

I'd appreciate suggestions as to what might consitute a candidate 
structure for the document - either by email (remove the "-junk" from 
"gjh-junk@bel-epa.com") or by direct entry into www.poplog.org's 
"Twiki" collaboration facility on:

http://www.poplog.org/twiki/bin/view/Poplog/PopforumFAQ

>Just for information, comp.lang.pop postings are now
>archived at
>     www.poplog.org
>
>i.e. in
>     http://www.poplog.org/talk/

And there's a Harvest engine running there too.
-- 
Cheers,

Graham Higgins
--------------
Bel EPA Bristol, UK.
http://bel-epa.com