From: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: rec.radio.amateur.misc
Subject: Re: FAQ - do you prefer the long form or the short form
Date: 18 Aug 1992 16:02:12 GMT
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Distribution: na
NNTP-Posting-Host: ucsd.edu

In article <1c0m#zp.mont@netcom.com> mont@netcom.com (Mont Pierce) writes:
>No.  According to on[sic] of the FAQ coordinators (I don't remember his name)
>Brian has been doing this for some time even though they asked him not to.

Nope, I've done it exactly twice in the last two years.  None before that.

>I think I would also be upset if I was trying to provide a service and 
>someone took all my work, reformated[sic] it and reposted it!

Hmmph.  Concatenating the parts together and removing the transport
headers is hardly 'reformating'.  Don't exaggerate.

>Well, I think that what Brian is trying to do is find out now is how many
>of us prefer the way he posts the FAQ verses the way the FAQ coordinators
>post it.  This has been an ongoing fued[sic] so to speak between him and some
>of the coordinators.  I'm glad he's taking a pole[sic], and I'm just voicing
>my opposition to his REposting and that I prefer the multiple part posting.

But it's not a feud, as we're discussing it privately. The poll
has, in general, met with a great deal of apathy.  The dozen or so
responses I've received don't seem to indicate a great preference one
way or another.  I've no intention of continuing to post the FAQ; I'm
just trying to convince the people who ARE posting it to change the way
they do it a bit.

Understand this: the info-hams mailing list and its associated newsgroups
(fa.info-hams, later net.ham-radio, now rec.radio.amateur.misc) have
been around a long time - the mailing list, for more than a decade.
When this 'FAQ' stuff started getting rolling a few years back, a few
newcomers to the net thought it would be a good idea, and began
assembling the postings.  Not a bad idea.

Initially, the FAQs began being posted from a site with a seriously broken
piece of Usenet software, so they were made small enough to endure the
faulty posting software there.  Later, they moved to another site which
does NOT have broken posting software, yet the postings have continued
in tiny pieces.  This, and the frequency with which they are posted, are
what I'm challenging.

[The idea of a FAQ is to answer frequently asked questions.  It's not
supposed to be a general factotum; it's counterproductive when the size
and frequency of the FAQ posting exceed the bandwidth of the questions
it's supposedly replacing.  We could SEPARATELY debate whether that
point has yet been reached or not.]

>Look, ALL, I repeat ALL news readers have a save option.  Try it, you'll 
>like it.

For technical reasons having to do with Usenet transport mechanisms,
it's often the case that postings arrive out of order.  This can be a
minor pain for people with advanced newsreaders, and a major one for
those with primitive ones.  For example, it's not too much of a pain to
use rn (the most common newsreader on Usenet) to save the articles to
discrete files (e.g., f.01, f.02, f.03, f.04) and then exit or suspend
it and use 'more' to read them.  Kinda defeats the purpose of the
newsreader, eh?

For people who read the traffic in this group via the associated
mailing list digest (info-hams), it's even more of a pain, since the
parts have to first be stripped out of the digests and then reassembled.
Since digests are sent when they exceed 32k to accomodate older mailers
(primarily on MILNET sites), the FAQ postings are guaranteed to be
split across multiple digests, which themselves are often received out
of order.

There were, at one time, some small number of sites on Usenet who had
limitations on the size of articles they could accept - generally based
on a 64k memory partition size in PDP-11s.  There were also some sites
running the 'notes' software who couldn't store articles that large.

I'll wager there are damn few PDP-11s on the net nowadays, and 'notes'
handles 64k+ articles just fine now.  Standard C and B news batching is
typically 100K batches, sometimes larger if the link is all via
highspeed modems.

The FAQ postings together make up about 90kb nowadays, if you remove the
additional 4k or so of redundant Usenet transport headers and
concatenate them together.  My experience shows that isn't too large to
post as one article, but even if you wanted to play extra-safe (can't
have them PDP-11's losing out on your wisdom, eh?), the FAQ could be
broken into just two pieces.  It surely doesn't need to be 6 parts
long!

(BTW, not ONE person has been able to provide the name or describe a
single known site that couldn't handle the large posting - best anyone
could come up with was "I'm told that certain ones can't" or some
equivalent legend.)

>Well, Brian ASKed for our opinions.  My comments were in response to his
>request, not to flame him.

I'll just chalk it up to your language skills and turn the other cheek,
rather than thinking you were indeed flaming.
	- Brian