Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.answers,alt.answers,comp.answers,misc.answers,rec.answers,sci.answers,soc.answers,talk.answers Subject: Introduction to the *.answers newsgroups Date: 5 Jun 1994 11:27:31 GMT From: jik@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU Archive-name: news-answers/introduction Version: $Id: Introduction,v 1.74 1994/06/03 21:50:05 pshuang Exp $ Introduction This is the monthly introductory article for the moderated newsgroups alt.answers, de.answers, comp.answers, misc.answers, news.answers, rec.answers, sci.answers, soc.answers, and talk.answers (hereafter collectively referred to as "*.answers"). It explains the purpose of the newsgroups, what kinds of articles should be submitted to them, how to submit, how to participate in the mailing list for periodic posting maintainers, and where to find archives of *.answers postings. Comments about, suggestions about or corrections to this posting are welcomed. If you would like to ask us to change this posting in some way, the method we appreciate most is for you to actually make the desired modifications to a copy of the posting, and then to send us the modified posting, or a context diff between the posted version and your modified version (if you do the latter, make sure to include in your mail the "Version:" line from the posted version). Submitting changes in this way makes dealing with them easier for us and helps to avoid misunderstandings about what you are suggesting. What is news.answers? The news.answers newsgroup is a repository for periodic informational postings (also called "Frequently Asked Questions" postings, or "FAQs") from other newsgroups. 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 human 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 or her posting is of interest only to people in its home hierarchy, then (s)he can (try to) restrict the distribution of the FAQ using the Distribution mechanism; if (s)he feels that it is of general interest, (s)he can avoid any Distribution restrictions, in which case the FAQ might receive a wider distribution than 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, we 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. What are the other *.answers newsgroups? Each of the other *.answers newsgroups (alt.answers, de.answers, comp.answers, misc.answers, rec.answers, sci.answers, soc.answers, talk.answers) is meant to serve as a repository for FAQ postings that are relevant to its hierarchy. FAQs are cross-posted to these *.answers newsgroups IN ADDITION, rather than instead of, to news.answers. For example, FAQs for newsgroups in the "rec" hierarchy are cross-posted to both rec.answers and news.answers. There shouldn't be any postings in these *.answers newsgroups that don't appear in news.answers as well. Obviously, since all postings in these newsgroups are cross-posted to news.answers, postings in these newsgroups must conform to the same guidelines as postings to news.answers. These *.answers newsgroups have a few purposes: * Site administrators can select which hierarchies' FAQs their sites receive with greater granularity than just "receive everything in news.answers" or "receive nothing in news.answers." They can receive FAQs for some newsgroups they don't receive, without receiving the FAQs for all newsgroups. * Similarly, people who wish to archive some FAQs at their sites can choose which postings to archive with greater granularity. * Users who wish to read the FAQs for certain hierarchies can read just those hierarchies' *.answers newsgroups, rather than having to read news.answers and skip over the postings they don't want to see. How does it work? An FAQ maintainer who wants an FAQ to appear in news.answers submits it to the moderators, following the guidelines in the "*.answers submission guidelines" posting for proper submission and format of the FAQ. The moderators accept the posting as-is, ask the submitter to make modifications, or reject it completely. If modifications are requested, the submitter makes the modifications and resubmits the posting to news.answers. FAQs that are approved are assigned a unique (to *.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 "*.answers submission guidelines" posting. Once an FAQ has been approved for *.answers, its maintainer can post it directly to the group(s) him- or herself, by indicating in the header of the message that it was approved by the news.answers moderators. FAQ maintainers who don't know how to do that can contact the news.answers moderators to find out. This needs to be emphasized: we will not actually post copies of FAQs in *.answers. Instead, our job is to approve FAQs, which are then cross-posted by their maintainers to the *.answers, and to watch the *.answers groups to make sure unauthorized postings do not appear in them. However, we will assist FAQ maintainers who would like us to post their FAQs for them and/or who would like help in figuring out how to properly go about posting a periodic FAQ. (Furthermore, see the FAQ posting service mentioned at the end of the "Submission instructions" section of the "*.answers submission guidelines" posting.) What about the mailing lists? 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 *.answers are encouraged to join. 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@MIT.Edu, with a blind carbon copy ("bcc") to faq-maintainers-announce@MIT.Edu (if you don't know how to do this, ask for help from someone at your site or contact us), so that replies to your message will go to the faq-maintainers list rather than the faq-maintainers-announce list (which should not be used for discussion). Where are *.answers archived? All of the *.answers newsgroups are archived in the periodic posting archive on rtfm.mit.edu [18.181.0.24]. Postings are located in the anonymous ftp directories /pub/usenet/alt.answers, /pub/usenet/comp.answers, etc., and are archived by "Archive-name". Other subdirectories of /pub/usenet contain periodic postings that may not appear in *.answers (as well as most of the *.answers postings), saved by Subject line rather than by Archive-name. 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@rtfm.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 rtfm.mit.edu archive), sorted by country, are: Belgium ------- gopher cc1.kuleuven.ac.be port 70 anonymous FTP cc1.kuleuven.ac.be:/anonymous.202 mail-server listserv@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be get avail faqs Canada ------ gopher jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca port 70 France ------ anonymous ftp ftp.cnam.fr:/pub/FAQ grasp1.insa-lyon.fr:/pub/faq grasp1.insa-lyon.fr:/pub/faq-by-newsgroup gopher gopher.insa-lyon.fr, port 70 mail server listserver@grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr Germany ------- anonymous ftp ftp.Germany.EU.net:/pub/newsarchive/news.answers ftp.informatik.uni-muenchen.de:/pub/comp/usenet/news.answers ftp.uni-paderborn.de:/doc/FAQ ftp.saar.de:/pub/usenet/news.answers (local access only) gopher gopher.Germany.EU.net, port 70. gopher.uni-paderborn.de mail server archive-server@Germany.EU.net ftp-mailer@informatik.tu-muenchen.de ftp-mail@uni-paderborn.de World Wide Web http://www.Germany.EU.net:80/ FSP ftp.Germany.EU.net, port 2001 gopher index gopher://gopher.Germany.EU.net:70/1.archive gopher://gopher.uni-paderborn.de:70/0/Service/FTP Mexico ------ anonymous ftp mtecv2.mty.itesm.mx:/pub/usenet/news.answers The Netherlands --------------- anonymous ftp ftp.cs.ruu.nl:/pub/NEWS.ANSWERS gopher gopher.win.tue.nl, port 70 mail server mail-server@cs.ruu.nl Switzerland ----------- anonymous ftp ftp.switch.ch:/info_service/usenet/periodic-postings anonymous UUCP chx400:ftp/info_service/Usenet/periodic-postings mail server archiver-server@nic.switch.ch telnet nic.switch.ch, log in as "info" Taiwan ------ anonymous ftp ftp.edu.tw:/USENET/FAQ mail server ftpmail@ftp.edu.tw United States ------------- anonymous ftp ftp.uu.net:/usenet World Wide Web http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu:80/hypertext/faq/usenet/top.html If you decide to archive *.answers and make them available to people for anonymous ftp, mail archive server or something else, please let us know so we can mention your archive in this posting. Note that the ability to access the posting archives on rtfm.mit.edu via the WAIS protocol has been disabled indefinitely due to load problems on the machine. Thanks to the following people for running the various FAQ archives mentioned above: Martin Berli Torsten Blum Frederic Chauveau Ingo Dressler Thomas A. Fine J. Anthony Fitzgerald Armin Gruner Hank P. Penning Juan G Ruiz Pinto James R. Revell, Jr. Thomas Thissen Herman Van Uytven Arjan de Vet -- pshuang@mit.edu (Ping Huang) jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan I. Kamens) ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Koenig) buglady@bronze.lcs.mit.edu (Aliza R. Panitz) pschleck@unomaha.edu (Paul W. Schleck) -- the *.answers moderation team