============================================================================== RED CIENTIFICA PERUANA INTFAQ ============================================================================== Subject: Introduction to the news.answers newsgroup ========================================== From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) Date: 20 Oct 92 05:00:33 GMT Archive-name: news-answers/introduction Version: $Id: Introduction,v 1.32 1992/10/11 02:55:07 jik Exp $ Introduction This is the monthly introductory article for the moderated newsgroup news.answers. It explains the purpose of the newsgroup, what kinds of articles should be submitted, how to submit, how to participate in the mailing list for periodic posting maintainers, and where to find archives of news.answers postings. Comments about, suggestions about or corrections to this posting are welcomed. If you would like to ask me to change this posting in some way, the method I appreciate most is for you to actually make the desired modifications to a copy of the posting, and then to send me the modified posting, or a context diff between my posted version and your modified version (if you do the latter, make sure to include in your mail the "Version:" line from my posted version). Submitting changes in this way makes dealing with them easier for me and helps to avoid misunderstandings about what you are suggesting. What is news.answers? The news.answers newsgroup serves as a repository in which periodic informational postings (a.k.a "Frequently Asked Questions" postings, or "FAQs") from other newsgroups are posted. Although it's difficult to say exactly what qualifies as an FAQ that belongs in news.answers, the basic description is, "any posting which answers common questions and is meant to be read by humans beings." Furthermore, FAQs cross-posted in news.answers should have meaningful subject lines. For example, an FAQ for rec.chess should have a subject line saying something like "chess Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)," rather than just "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)." For example, the comp.unix.questions "Frequently Asked Questions about Unix - with Answers [Monthly posting]" and the news.announce.newusers "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette" belong in news.answers, as does the README file from comp.mail.maps. However, the comp.mail.maps map postings and the readership statistics from news.lists do not. FAQ postings from any hierarchy that travels using "USENET mechanisms" can be cross-posted to news.answers (i.e. news.answers is not limited to postings from the comp, sci, misc, soc, talk, news and rec hierarchies). If an FAQ maintainer feels that his (and I mean that "his" in a completely politically correct, general neutral way, so don't bother complaining about it) posting is of interest only to people in its home hierarchy, then he can (try to) restrict the distribution of the FAQ using the Distribution mechanism; if he feels that it is of more general interest, he can avoid any Distribution restrictions, in which case the FAQ might receive a wider distribution that most postings in the hierarchy. This is a pretty reasonable thing, considering that FAQs are often considered the "distilled wisdom" of a newsgroup or group of newsgroups, so a single FAQ from a hierarchy might be of wider interest than the hierarchy as a whole. Where there is an ambiguity, I will decide whether or not a posting belongs in the newsgroup. There are several reasons why this newsgroup exists. They include: * It is easier for site administrators to keep FAQs around for a long time if they are all cross-posted to one newsgroup.... Administrators can make the maximum expire time for news.answers very long, instead of making every newsgroup with FAQs in it have a long maximum expire time. * It is easier for sites that archive FAQs to generate their archives, since they will need to watch just one newsgroup rather than scanning the entire news spool. * It provides a "quick reference" for users, in several different respects. Users who want to browse through the various FAQs that the USENET has to offer can do so in just one newsgroup. Users who want to find an FAQ from a particular newsgroup but don't know its subject can search for that newsgroup in the headers of the articles in news.answers. * Software for retrieving FAQs can also be simplified to use news.answers as the basis for FAQ searches. How does it work? An FAQ maintainer who wants his FAQ to appear in news.answers submits it to the moderator, following the guidelines in the "news.answers submission guidelines" posting for proper submission and format of the FAQ. The moderator either accepts the posting as-is, asks the submitter to make modifications, or rejects it completely. If modifications are requested, the submitter makes the modifications and resubmits the posting to news.answers. FAQs that are approved will be assigned a unique (to news.answers) archive name, which the FAQ maintainer should put in an "Archive-name:" line at the top of the FAQ. For example, the comp.unix.questions FAQ might be given the archive name "unix-faq", in which case "Archive-name: unix-faq" would be added to the top of the FAQ. Multi-part postings will be so labeled in the "Archive-name:" line, for example, "Archive-name: X-faq/part1". FAQ submitters should put the "Archive-name:" line in their postings, with a suggested archive name in it. For more information about choosing archive name, see the "news.answers submission guidelines" posting. Once an FAQ has been approved for news.answers, its maintainer can post it directly to the group himself, by indicating in the header of the message that it was approved by the news.answers moderator. FAQ maintainers who don't know how to do that can contact the news.answers moderator to find out. This should be emphasized: I will not actually post copies of FAQs in the newsgroup. Instead, my job is to approve FAQs, which are then cross-posted by their maintainers to the newsgroup, and to watch the newsgroup to make sure unauthorized postings do not appear in it. However, I am willing to assist FAQ maintainers who would like me to post their FAQs for them, and/or who would like help in figuring out how to properly go about posting a periodic FAQ. What about the mailing list? If you are interested in discussion about the maintenance of USENET periodic postings and related topics (e.g. automatic archival of such postings), you may wish to join the "faq-maintainers" mailing list. FAQ maintainers who post FAQs in news.answers are encouraged to join the mailing list. If you are not interested in discussion, but you would still like to receive announcements directed to FAQ maintainers, then you may wish to join the "faq-maintainers-announce" list instead. Note that subscribers to faq-maintainers will automatically receive messages sent to faq-maintainers-announce. To subscribe to or unsubscribe from one of these lists, send mail with your request to faq-maintainers-request@MIT.Edu. To send a message to "faq-maintainers," write to faq-maintainers@MIT.Edu. To send a message to "faq-maintainers-announce", write to faq-maintainers-announce@MIT.Edu, and if at all possible, put "Reply-To: faq-maintainers@MIT.Edu" in the header of your message. Where is news.answers archived? News.answers is archived in the periodic posting archive on pit-manager.mit.edu [18.172.1.27]. Postings are located in the anonymous ftp directory /pub/usenet/news.answers, and are archived by "Archive-name". Other subdirectories of /pub/usenet contain periodic postings that may not appear in news.answers. If you do not have anonymous ftp access, you can access the archives by mail server as well. Send an E-mail message to mail-server@pit-manager.mit.edu with "help" and "index" in the body on separate lines for more information. Other news.answers/FAQ archives (which carry some or all of the FAQs in the pit-manager archive) are: archive.cs.ruu.nl [131.211.80.5] in the anonymous ftp directory /pub/NEWS.ANSWERS (also accessible via mail server requests to mail-server@cs.ruu.nl) cnam.cnam.fr [192.33.159.6] in the anonymous ftp directory /pub/FAQ ftp.uu.net [137.39.1.9 or 192.48.96.9] in the anonymous ftp directory /usenet ftp.win.tue.nl [131.155.70.100] in the anonymous ftp directory /pub/usenet/news.answers grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr [134.214.100.25] in the anonymous ftp directory /pub/faq (also accessible via mail server requests to listserv@grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr, and via gopher on port 70) nctuccca.edu.tw [140.111.3.21] in the anonymous ftp directory /USENET/FAQ nic.switch.ch [130.59.1.40] in the anonymous ftp directory /info_service/Usenet/periodic-postings, with FAQs in the "faqs" subdirectory and an index in the "00index" file (also accessible by telnet'ing to nic.switch.ch and logging in as "info", or by mail to archive-server@nic.switch.ch, or by anonymous UUCP to host chx400 in the directory ~/ftp/info_service/Usenet/periodic-postings) Furthermore, the gopher server on port 70 of jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca [131.202.3.10] has a news.answers archive. If you decide to archive news.answers and make it available to people for anonymous ftp, mail archive server or something else, please let me know so I can mention your archive in this posting. Note that the periodic posting archives on pit-manager.mit.edu are also accessible via Prospero and WAIS (the database name is "usenet" on port 210). If you don't know what Prospero or WAIS are, don't worry about it. And don't write to me and ask, please; I unfortuately already have too many things to deal with without having to answer questions about other people's software. Credits Thanks to Martin Berli for running the SWITCH FAQ archive, Frederic Chauveau for running the cnam.cnam.fr FAQ archive, James R. Revell, Jr. for running the ftp.uu.net archive, Hank P. Penning for running the archive.cs.ruu.nl archive, and for running the grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr server. Thanks to J. Anthony Fitzgerald for making news.answers postings available via gopher on the unba.ca gopher server. -- Jonathan Kamens jik@MIT.Edu MIT Information Systems/Athena Moderator, news.answers .