From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups,comp.answers
Subject: Followup/Results of the FAQ Experiment
Date: 10 Apr 92 06:33:07 GMT
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada

Over two weeks ago I made a proposal about improving the precision in which
FAQ posting propagation can be controlled.  Namely, that FAQs, in addition to
being posted to their "appropriate" groups and crossposted to news.answers,
could also be cross-posted to a heirarchy specific "answers" newsgroup.  Ie: the
comp.text FAQ would have the following newsgroups line:

	Newsgroups: news.answers,comp.text,comp.answers
Why?
	So machines with relatively small feeds can choose to not get
	all of the FAQs (by not being fed news.answers), but could choose
	to get all of the FAQs for a specific hierarchy, without receiving
	the whole hierarchy itself.

Advantages:
    1) Doesn't impact current practise - if you don't get news.answers now,
       you still won't get it.  If you do receive news.answers, you get all of
       the FAQs as per usual.  Ie: this does not "change" news.answers in
       any way.
    2) If news.answers exists on your machine, all cross-posted articles
       that your machine does get will appear in news.answers, whether you
       receive them by an explicit feed of "<hierarchy>.answers", or implicitly
       by receiving all of comp, or an explicit feed of the other groups they
       are cross-posted to.

The only time you would receive a FAQ that you wouldn't normally get, is if
your feed has something like:
	!news.answers,comp,!comp.foo
You would receive the faq for comp.foo even though you don't receive comp.foo
or news.answers.  Which would be an advantage to some.  And to those who don't
want to receive the comp.foo faq, since you're already getting most of comp,
the additional load is insignificant.

One further part of the proposal was *not* creating the hierarchy-specific
groups themselves.  They can be mentioned in the Newsgroups line, and since
they're cross-posted to other groups, they will be propagated as normal -
without the hierarchy-specific groups having to exist.  They then become
more of a Distribution field than an actual newsgroup.  Postings to
groups non-existant on systems happen all the time already - regionals, gnu,
inet groups etc.

The only time that these newsgroups have to be created is if users wish to
see a newsgroup with just FAQs for a specific heirarchy.  Then the newsgroup
can be created - locally *only*.

Two weeks ago I performed an experiment:
    1) The comp.text faq was posted to: comp.text,comp.answers,news.answers.
       This was to see if there were any systems that would experience problems
       with it.
    2) I posted an explanation of the proposal and experiment to news.admin.
    3) Included a questionaire to find out whether SA's would find this
       a useful "feature".

The results have trickled in, and here is the summary:

System problems with non-existant newsgroups: Cnews, Bnews and Waffle have no
problems whatsoever.  This is commonly occuring after all.  ANU-news
has an option where it will automatically create a directory for a non-existant
newsgroup if the sys file's "ME" line matches.  This is actually a rather
dumb option, because it would require constant intervention by the SA
to twiddle ME lines and delete undesirable directories (if only
newsgroup misspelling) - especially on biggish feeds.  The only
advantage to this option is not having to worry about spooning articles
out of a junk directory into a post-fact created group.  [I don't bother.
If I do create the group, I leave the old articles in junk.  New articles
will go in the proper place].  ANU-news is overly helpful in other ways -
previous versions invented Message-ID's and other headers of the articles
didn't have them.  Responsible for much of the duplicate article problems
we've seen on the net.

No reports for other versions of news.  Nobody screamed.  Not even
any (real) flames.  How depressing ;-)

I received 23 responses to the questionaire.  A couple of people misunderstood
the proposal, thinking that I was somehow "damaging" news.answers or
somehow trying to circumvent systems trying to control their feeds.  After
I responded with a better explanation, I got a different response.

All 23 respondants were in favour of heirarchy-specific answers groups.
Many said that they wouldn't use it now, but see the utility in the feature,
and might use it themselves later.

One person went as far as to say:

    The hierarchy-specific groups would certainly be an order of magnitude
    better than news.answers--which IMHO is just crap.  (It's a clumsy way to
    waste disk space...I'll carry alt.flame with a 2-month expiration before
    I'll carry news.answers.)  I think the hier-spec groups might work.  How
    about proposing that we replace news.answers with hierarchy-specific
    groups?:-)

19 of the 23 felt that the heirarchy-specific groups do not need to be
created.  4 of the 23 felt that they should be created.  Whether this
was a misunderstanding of the proposal, fears of their readers misbehaving
(they shouldn't - it already happens all the time now), or something else,
I don't know.

One respondant suggested a new heirarchy and groups called "faqs.<heirarchy>"
instead of <heirarchy>.answers.  These groups wouldn't have to exist
either.  This idea has a certain attraction.

So, the idea does seem to have some merit.  So I'll continue playing with
it for a bit.

What next?

First of all, today I posted the comp.text and UNIX email software faq.
Both of them are now cross-posted to comp.answers.  The email faq is
also cross-posted to news.admin, so if you can see this posting, you can
see it too, and prove to yourself that your news reader won't blow up.
In fact, *this* article is cross-posted to comp.answers too.

If your reader or news transport misbehaves, please let me know.

Secondly, I think we should discuss the naming.  Is <heirarchy>.answers
what we want to use?  Something else?

And thirdly, once the naming convention has settled out, we can see
about:
	1) Writing up a FAQ on how to make use of this feature.
	   [Remember, you can simply ignore the "feature" and things
	   behave exactly as they do now.]
	2) Adjusting the news.answers instructions to tell how
	   to encorporate the "feature" into FAQs.  This
	   is likely to remain "optional".  But as more people
	   find it useful, pressure will be brought to bear.
-- 
Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
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