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Archive-name: news-answers/guidelines Version: $Id: guidelines,v 1.134 1995/01/28 21:58:23 pshuang Exp $ Posting-Frequency: monthly [The most recent copy of this document can be obtained via anonymous FTP as rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/news-answers/guidelines. If you do not have access to anonymous FTP, you can retrieve it by sending email to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the command "send usenet/news.answers/news-answers/guidelines" in the message.] ROADMAP In order to submit a periodic informational posting for the news.answers newsgroup (and if appropriate for one or more of the other *.answers newsgroups [alt.answers, comp.answers, de.answers, misc.answers, rec.answers, sci.answers, soc.answers, talk.answers] as well), you should first modify the header of your posting to conform to the guidelines given below in Section I. Then, you should submit your posting to us using the instructions given in Section II. Once your posting is approved, you will post it directly to news.answers and other *.answers newsgroups yourself. WE EMPHASIZE THIS POINT, BECAUSE THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN HOW MOST MODERATED USENET NEWSGROUPS WORK. We will not actually complete the posting of periodic informational postings into *.answers. Instead, our job is to check that submissions conform to these guidelines, and then explain to their maintainers how they may post directly with our approval. More details are given in Section III. This document assumes a reasonable familiarity with the the *.answers newsgroups (and to a lesser extent, the List of Periodic Informational Postings), and the rtfm.mit.edu archives. See Section IV to see how to obtain introductory documents. We strongly recommend that you read both this entire article, and the companion "Introduction to the *.answers newsgroups" posting. The workload of the *.answers moderators is greatly increased by people who fail to follow the guidelines, or follow them incompletely. We have tried to make these guidelines as simple and easy-to-follow as possible, to encourage as many FAQs and other periodic postings as possible to be cross-posted to the *.answers groups. However, our minimal standards are needed to keep the *.answers groups, and the periodic posting archives, updated and usefully organized. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Submission guidelines A. Why have guidelines? 1. Appropriateness 2. Usefulness to people 3. Automatic archiving B. What these guidelines DON'T specify C. What if you can't or won't follow the guidelines? D. Software tools for maintaining/posting your articles E. Standard header lines 1. Normal Usenet header lines a. Newsgroups (REQUIRED) b. Subject (REQUIRED) c. Followup-To (REQUIRED), From (REQUIRED), and Reply-To (OPTIONAL) d. Expires (OPTIONAL), Supersedes (OPTIONAL), References (OPTIONAL) e. Summary (OPTIONAL) 2. Auxiliary header lines a. Archive-name (REQUIRED) b. Other archive names (OPTIONAL) c. Posting-Frequency (OPTIONAL) d. Last-modified (OPTIONAL), Version (OPTIONAL), URL (OPTIONAL) 3. Sample posting headers F. Posting frequency G. Mailing lists for periodic informational postings maintainers H. List of Periodic Informational Postings I. Checklist II. Submission instructions A. How actually to submit your postings B. What will we do with your submission C. What next? III. Post-approval considerations A. Transfer an posting to a new maintainer B. Change an posting's posting frequency C. Change an posting's header(s) 1. Subject line 2. Newsgroups line 3. From line, without changing maintainers 4. Archive-name line 5. Followup-To line 6. Other normal or auxilary header lines D. Add parts to or delete parts from a "posting" 1. Split up a single-part posting 2. Add a new part to a posting which already has multiple parts a. If the new part's headers are consistent with the other parts b. If the new Subject or archive-name does not fit an established pattern 3. Delete a part from a multi-part posting 4. Add a diff posting 5. Terminate an posting (i.e., stop posting it forever) E. Cancel one of your postings F. Create a new posting IV. Other Related Documents V. This posting ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: I. Submission guidelines ---------------- A. Why have guidelines? These *.answers submission guidelines serve to ensure that three overall goals are met by postings in the *.answers newsgroups. 1. Appropriateness Only PERIODIC, INFORMATIONAL postings that are intended to be read by people belong in the *.answers newsgroups. Requirements in the guidelines such as a valid "Followup-To:" line (to help prevent discussion of of the contents of particular periodic informational postings from appearing in the *.answers newsgroups) further this goal. 2. Usefulness to people The postings should be as useful as possible, both for the people who read them in the home newsgroups and for the people who read them in the *.answers newsgroups. Requirements such as descriptive "Subject:" lines and carefully chosen "Newsgroups:" lines further this goal. 3. Automatic archiving One of the main points for having *.answers newsgroups is that they can be archived automatically in order to build up a database of periodic informational postings. Requirements such as the "Archive-name:" line further that goal. ---------------- B. What these guidelines DON'T specify These guidelines DO NOT specify a specific, required format for the bodies of periodic informational postings. Postings in *.answers are not required to adhere to "Digest Message Format" format (Internet RFC 1153), or MIME (RFC 1341), or HTML, or SGML, or any other text format. This omission is intentional. Forcing all *.answers postings to adhere to a specific format would dissuade many maintainers from submitting their postings to *.answers. Such a result would be in direct contradiction to the chartered purpose of *.answers, which is to encourage cross-posting of all relevant periodic postings; therefore, maintainers are free to choose whatever format they want (assuming that it is human-readable) for the bodies of their postings. What format will best serve the expected readership of a particular posting is likely to vary greatly. These guidelines also DO NOT specify lower or upper limits for the size of an acceptable posting. However, a pragmatic lower limit is set by the requirement that the articles be useful to people (having to search through too many tiny postings may be discouraging to the reader). As for a pragmatic upper limit, maintainers may wish to consider that part of their audience may not be able to access too large articles due to intermediary news (and gateway) software problems (64KB is a common magic size). ---------------- C. What if you can't or won't follow the guidelines? The *.answers submission guidelines are designed to facilitate automatic archiving of posts, while at the same time being minimally intrusive to the readers, and cause a minimum of extra work for the maintainer. If, for technical reasons, you cannot post your article on a regular timely basis with the required header formats, you may want to look into using the faq-server to automatically post your article(s). (See Section D.) Some maintainers choose to have another person post their article for them, such as a non-*.answers newsgroup moderator, or a friend who posts other periodic postings. This method is discouraged (although not outlawed), as it may lead to confusion as to who is really maintaining the post, or to misunderstandings as to when and how the article is to be posted. Please note that you DO NOT need to follow these guidelines if you are not interested in cross-posting to the *.answers newsgroups. Although we encourage authors of appropriate postings to submit them for cross-posting into *.answers, there are numerous reasons why authors may choose to not do so. Even if you do not wish to submit your posting for *.answers at this time, you may still wish to obtain a listing for your article in the List of Periodic Informational Postings (LoPIP), maintained by us. See Section IV for instructions on how to obtain more information on the LoPIP. ---------------- D. Software tools for maintaining/posting your articles One useful tool for automatically posting your posting at a frequency you choose is the FAQ poster written by Jonathan Kamens. It is available from rtfm.mit.edu via anonymous FTP as /pub/post_faq/post_faq.shar, or via mail server (send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with "send post_faq/post_faq.shar" in the body). Post_faq takes an article with its static headers (i.e., the headers that don't change each time the article is posted) adds dynamic headers to it, and posts the article. Another utility, Ian Kluft's auto-faq package, provides more functionality, including automatic building and insertion of all headers. If you are looking for something with a high level of automation to assist you in your FAQ maintenance and posting, you might want to try auto-faq instead of post_faq. The latest version as of the writing of this text is 3.2 (it is strongly encouraged you use at least version 3.0 or later) and is available via anonymous FTP from charon.amdahl.com in files: /pub/faq/auto-faq32.part1.gz /pub/faq/auto-faq32.part2.gz /pub/faq/auto-faq32.part3.gz For further assistance with this particular package, send e-mail to auto-faq-help@kluft.com. Both packages require that you have the utility program Perl available at your site. Alternatively, you can use the FAQ server which we run: you use it by mailing your periodic informational postings and various commands to it, and it posts them periodically for you, at intervals you specify. This is a good solution if your site does not have Perl, or you cannot conveniently install either of the above two software packages, or your local news server won't let users post to a moderated newsgroup at all. For more information about the FAQ server, send e-mail to faq-server@rtfm.mit.edu with "help" (without the quotes) in the Subject line of your message. Note that before you send your posting to the faq-server, you should get it approved by us. Or, you may choose not to use any of these tools at all. Many maintainers of periodic informational postings have no problems with maintaining and posting their articles manually. ---------------- E. Standard header lines There must be two "headers" in a *.answers posting. The first is the normal header for a Usenet newsgroup article. The second header, what we call the auxiliary header, is separated from the the normal header by one or more completely blank lines. As far as normal news software is concerned, the auxiliary header is just part of the body of the article; however, *.answers requires specific information in the auxilary header. The requirements for each of the two headers are discussed in detail below. Required headers are marked with "(REQUIRED)", while optional ones are marked with "(OPTIONAL)". IF YOU ARE DAUNTED BY THE LENGTH OF THE GUIDELINES, PLEASE BEAR IN MIND THAT MANY OF THE HEADERS DESCRIBED BELOW ARE OPTIONAL. You should refer to Section 3 for complete sets of example headers while reading the detailed descriptions and explanations of the required and optional headers in Sections 1 and 2. The headers of this document can also serve as a sample. 1. Normal Usenet header lines You may include in the normal header of your posting any of the other standard header lines that are not explicitly discussed here. a. Newsgroups (REQUIRED) Example: Newsgroups: comp.sys.foo,comp.answers,news.answers We need to know exactly what will appear in the Newsgroups line of the posting. We expect that the contents of your Newsgroups line will only change rarely. Your Newsgroups line must include the natural home newsgroup(s) for its topic; i.e., the newsgroup(s) whose readers would be particularly interested in your posting. The home newsgroup in the above example would be comp.sys.foo. In addition, your Newsgroups line must contain the corresponding *.answers newsgroup(s) for the hierarchies of its home newsgroup(s). For example, a posting whose home newsgroups are rec.music.makers.synth and comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard should also include both rec.answers and comp.answers on its Newsgroups line. [There is one exception to the above rule of always crossposting to the corresponding *.answers groups: articles cross-posted into a nation-specific hierarchy in a different language than normally used in that hierarchy. Such an article should not go into the corresponding *.answers group for that newsgroup's hierarchy. At present, the only such case is de.answers, which is for German-language periodic informational postings only. For example, an English-language posting may be cross-posted to a de.* group if the maintainer feels it is useful there, but should not be not cross-posted to de.answers.] Finally, you must include news.answers in your Newsgroups line, even if your posting does not include any news.* newsgroup amongst its home newsgroup(s). News.answers is special in this regard amongst the *.answers newsgroups. Although the order of newsgroups on the line is not important from the point of view of news transport software, we prefer to have news.answers listed last. The other *.answers newsgroups should be listed just before news.answers. Listing the home newsgroup(s) first improves the accuracy of newsgroup volume statistics, provides better key information for index lists and catalogues of periodic informational postings, and minimizes accidental postings to the *.answers newsgroups from people using buggy newsreaders. Your Newsgroups line may not contain any whitespace (i.e., space, tabs, or newlines) except immediately after the colon after "Newsgroups". In particular, you should not use spaces after commas and you cannot continue your Newsgroups line onto subsequent lines. This is not a *.answers requirement, but rather a Usenet posting requirement; it is mentioned here because we see this mistake fairly often. b. Subject (REQUIRED) Example: Subject: comp.sys.foo Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Part 1/2 Subject: comp.sys.foo Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Part 2/2 The subject line of your posting should have some meaning outside of its home newsgroup(s). For example, instead of just "FAQ," you should use "<x> FAQ", where "<x>" is the name of the home newsgroup(s) or the topic being discussed. If you are identifying the topic of your posting rather than the home newsgroup(s), you should attempt to be sufficiently descriptive that readers who aren't already intimately familiar with the topic will be able to decide if they are interested in reading your posting. Furthermore, important information should appear near the beginning of the subject line, so that news readers that truncate the subject line while displaying a summary of what articles are available in a particular newsgroup don't cut off the meaningful part of your subject line, and so that your posting will alphabetize sensibly in the *.answers newsgroups. For example, instead of "Frequently Asked Questions about <x>," use "<x> Frequently asked Questions." Words like "The" and "A", as with book titles, cause alphabetization oddities, so please avoid using them at the beginning of your subject line. For postings which are being split into multiple parts, you should indicate in each posting's Subject line which part that particular posting is, and how many parts total there are. For this purpose, simple Arabic numerals are prefered over Roman numerals because Arabic numerals are more easily sorted and manipulated by software. Please note that most software used at sites which archive periodic informational postings treat the subject as case-sensitive -- it must always be capitalized in exactly the same way. Changing the spacing you use will also throw off archiving software, so please keep that constant as well. However, you may wish to include certain kinds of time-changing information in your Subject lines, i.e., a version number or a "most recent modified" date. That's OK with us, so long as the overall format of your subject lines will stay constant, and it is clear exactly what will be changing from posting to posting. For example: Subject: rec.pets.rocks FAQ, Version 1.42, (modified 11/19/94) In the case above, we would expect that the version number and date would be changing, but that the overall format would stay the same. Changing the parenthenses into brackets, or removing them, or changing the word "Version" to "vers.", are some typical unacceptable changes. c. Followup-To (REQUIRED), From (REQUIRED), and Reply-To (OPTIONAL) Example: From: guru@foosys.com (Joe R. Programmer) Followup-To: comp.sys.foo Reply-To: faq-mail@foosys.com (FAQ Comments address) Your posting must have a Followup-To line in the header that directs followups to somewhere other than *.answers. You may choose to direct followups back to the home newsgroup(s) of the posting, or to direct followups back to you, in which case "Followup-To: poster" is sufficient. (That means that you actually put the word "poster" there, as specified in the RFC which describes the format of Usenet postings. Do NOT put an e-mail address in the Followup-To line.) If you forget the Followup-To and people who are trying to followup to your posting end up submitting their followups to the *.answers moderators, we're going to get peeved at you. In the above example, "guru" apparently wants mail about the posting to go to a different address than the rest of his mail. We've shown the From line, because the version of the posting that you submit to us should show the From line just as it will appear when the article is actually posted. Furthermore, your posting must have a valid e-mail reply address somewhere in the header, either in the From line, or if not in the From line then in a Reply-To line. On nearly all systems, the From line will automatically contain your correct Internet address. If it does not, then you will need to either use a posting package (see Section X.X) that allows you to insert the correct From line, or use a Reply-To line so that you can get responses to your post. d. Expires (OPTIONAL), Supersedes (OPTIONAL), References (OPTIONAL) Example: Expires: Fri, 1 May 1992 00:00:00 GMT Supersedes: <foo-faq/part2_701650000@foosys.com> References: <foo-faq/part1_702000000@foosys.com> It is a good idea to use Expires and Supersedes header lines to make sure that each version of your posting stays around until the next time it is posted, and so that each posting replaces the now-outdated previous posting. The Expires header should contain a date (in the above format) which is far enough into the future that a new version of the article will be posted before the one you're posting now expires. The Supersedes header should contain the Message-ID of the previously-posted article. Furthermore, if you are posting a multi-part posting or a series of related postings, it is a good idea to add a "References:" line to all of the postings except the first one, making the contents of that line the Message-ID of the first posting in the series. If you do this, then people who use threaded news readers will be able to manipulate the entire series as a single thread, including (for example) killing the entire thread if they're not interested or saving the entire thread to a file with one command. The posting tools mentioned above support an option for doing this. We've shown all three headers in the format the post_faq package would use. e. Summary (OPTIONAL) Example: Summary: This posting contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions (and their answers) about Foo computers. It should be read by anyone who wishes to post to the comp.sys.foo newsgroup. You are encouraged to put a summary of the contents of your article in the Summary line of the header. Try to describe what your posting discusses, and aim your description at someone who may not actually be directly interested in the topic covered by your posting. There have been discussions about using the Summary lines of the postings in *.answers to construct a short "catalog" of the information available, so think of the Summary line as a catalog entry for your posting. If you have a group of related postings or a multi-part posting, you should consider either keeping your summaries in each posting short (describing only that posting's contents), or have a completely identical summary for all the postings, describing what topics the postings collective cover. With respect to the idea of constructing a catalog mentioned above, having identical summaries will allow automatic elimination of redundant summary text in the catalog. Note that Usenet header lines (except for the Newsgroups line) are allowed to span multiple lines, as long as the continuation lines after the first START with a space or tab; this is particularly relevant for the Summary line, which will often be too long to fit comfortable on a single line, and should be continued onto subsequent lines. 2. Auxiliary header lines The auxiliary header looks like the main message header (i.e., has lines of the format "Line-name: line-value"), but is separated from the main message header by a completely blank line, as well as followed by a completely blank line separating it from the rest of the body of the message. a. Archive-name (REQUIRED) Example: Archive-name: foo-faq/part2 In order to be approved for cross-posting into *.answers newsgroups, your posting must include an auxiliary header with an Archive-name line. The archive name is used to determine where the posting should be stored in archives in directories for newsgroups which end in ".answers". (For example, on rtfm.mit.edu, your posting's archive name is appended to the path /pub/usenet/___.answers/ to determine where to store your posting, for each of the *.answers newsgroups which it is cross-posted to). It should be chosen to give people, even those who do not read the home newsgroup(s) of the posting, a pretty good idea of what the posting archived by that archive name is about. Therefore, abbreviations which will only be recognized by people already familiar with the topic covered should be avoided if possible. The archive name should be composed of one or more one-word (i.e., no spaces) components, separated by slashes. Each component should be 14 characters or less in length, if possible, but this is not a strict requirement; if 14 characters isn't enough, then each component should be unique in the first 14 characters (i.e., two archive names should never be identical after their components are all truncated to 14 characters). Consider choosing archive names based on what the posting is about rather than deriving an archive name from the newsgroups you post to; if you do the latter, your archive name will usually be longer than necessary, and less informative. Please note that most archivers treat the archive name as case-sensitive -- it must always be capitalized in exactly the same way. We have a preference for lowercase or mixed case, not all uppercase. Avoid periods in the archive name, because some operating systems choke on them; if you must have word separators, use hyphens or underscores rather than periods (hyphens are preferred). Spaces or tabs are not allowed. The archive namespace is hierarchical; for example, there are a number of lists of bookstores in the "books/stores" directory of the namespace, and all of their archive names start with "books/stores/". Therefore, do not use slashes in your archive name unless you are taking advantage of the hierarchical nature of the namespace, i.e., unless there are or might be in the future multiple related postings which should appear in a single directory in the archive namespace. To make the archives more useful, we encourage collecting posts on related topics into the same directory. Multi-part postings should be named "name/part1", "name/part2", etc. Alternatively, if the parts of the postings are split by topic rather than by size, then you can use short topic names rather than "part1", "part2", etc. If you post a diff for your posting, it should be named "name/diff". If you post multiple diffs for multi-part postings, they should be named "name/diff1", "name/diff2", etc. (if you want to use just one diff for multi-part postings, you can just use "name/diff" as its name). If you post a diff to a one-part posting, then the original posting should be named "name/part1" (or "name/faq", or whatever else you think is appropriate, as long as we approve it) and the diff should be named "name/diff". Consider these more extensive examples: Subject Archive name(s) ----------------------------------- ---------------------- rec.arts.theatre.* FAQ theatre/part1 theatre/part2 theatre/part3 rec.arts.movies FAQs, various topics movies/biographies movies/brazil-faq movies/crazy-credits movies/faq movies/quotes/part1 movies/quotes/part2 movies/trivia-faq soc.culture.esperanto FAQ esperanto-faq Please pick the archive name that you would like to use for your posting, and include the Archive-name line with that archive name in it, when submitting to *.answers. If there is some problem with it, or if we would like to suggest an alternate name, we will let you know. [A partial listing of archive names of existing *.answers postings can be obtained via anonymous FTP as rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/index. You may wish to refer to it to see if there are already parts of the namespace established which would be most appropriate for your postings.] If your posting already has an Archive-name line for other purposes which is not a valid *.answers archive name and you do not want to change it (e.g., you are already using an Archive-name line to specify where your posting should be archived on sites which archive *.sources newsgroups), you can use a "News-answers-archive-name:" header line instead. See the next section for details. We recommend (but do not require) that you include in the body of your posting instructions on how to retrieve up-to-date copies, so that a reader who gets their hands on an old copy can get a new copy. Your posting will be archived by a number of different filenames on rtfm.mit.edu; the one derived from your archive name (e.g., /pub/usenet/news.answers/ARCHIVE-NAME) will usually be the shortest and most stable, and therefore would be easy for a reader to use. (We also provide archived copies of your posting under filenames derived from your home newsgroup(s) and subject line because they may be easier to guess at for someone who is browsing through the archives.) b. Other archive names (OPTIONAL) As noted above, the software which builds the periodic informational postings archive on rtfm.mit.edu automatically uses the "Archive-name:" line to determine the file name in which to save a posting, when saving it in any newsgroup ending in ".answers" (news.answers, rec.aviation.answers, etc.). Furthermore, if you have a line of the form "Newsgroup-name-archive-name: name" in your posting's auxiliary header (see the example below: "Newsgroup-name" should be replaced with an actual newsgroup name, replacing periods with hyphens), the specified archive name will be used to save in the specified newsgroup. Such a newsgroup-specific archive name overrides the generic "Archive-name:" line. When an archive name for a posting cannot be determined for one of the newsgroups it is cross-posted to, its subject line (with some minor modifications) is used as its file name in that newsgroup's directory. For example, if you have this in your normal header: Newsgroups: comp.foo,comp.bar,comp.answers,news.answers Subject: comp.sys.foo Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Part 2/2 and this in your auxiliary header: Archive-name: foo-faq/part2 Comp-bar-archive-name: bar-faq/part2 then the posting will be saved as "foo-faq/part2" in the directories comp.answers/ and news.answers/ (because they are both *.answers newsgroups and will use the Archive-name line), but as "bar-faq/part2" in comp.bar/. (It will also be archived under its Subject line in comp.foo/.) If you do decide to specify additional newsgroup-specific archive names in your posting, please obey the guidelines for archive names given above. c. Posting-Frequency (OPTIONAL) Example: Posting-Frequency: monthly (third Monday) A Posting-Frequency line in the auxiliary header indicates clearly to the reader how often your article is posted. If you specify this line, updates you make to it will be automatically copied into the "List of Periodic Informational Postings". (During the submission process, you must inform us somehow the frequency with which you plan to post. This header is optional because you don't have to use IT to inform us -- you can also just tell us your planned frequency directly in separate email.) d. Last-modified (OPTIONAL), Version (OPTIONAL), URL (OPTIONAL) Example: Last-modified: 1992/03/25 Version: 2.5 URL: http://some-site.org/my_faq.html You can have other lines in the auxiliary header, if you want. Some common ones are "Last-modified:" and "Version:", which are self-explanatory. A "URL:" line if you have one could contain a World Wide Web "address" (universal resource locator) which points to an hypertext version of your posting's contents. From the point of view of these guidelines, however, you may put any text you want in these and other unmentioned lines, in any format you wish. 3. Sample posting headers Putting together the examples we've given above, here is what the headers of part 2 of a multi-part FAQ might look like, as submitted to us: From: guru@foosys.com (Joe R. Programmer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.foo,comp.answers,news.answers Subject: comp.sys.foo Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Part 2/2 Followup-To: comp.sys.foo Reply-To: faq-mail@foosys.com (FAQ Comments address) Summary: This posting contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions (and their answers) about Foo computers. It should be read by anyone who wishes to post to the comp.sys.foo newsgroup. Expires: Fri, 1 May 1992 00:00:00 GMT Supersedes: <foo-faq/part2_701650000@foosys.com> References: <foo-faq/part1_702000000@foosys.com> Archive-name: foo-faq/part2 Posting-Frequency: monthly Last-modified: 1992/03/25 Version: 2.5 URL: http://some-site.org/my_faq.html The one or more lines separating the normal header from the auxiliary header must be completely blank, i.e., not even containing just tabs or spaces; there must also be one or more lines immediately following the auxillary header which is completely blank. A fairly minimal set of headers which would still meet these guidelines might look like this: From: joeuser@somewhere.org Newsgroups: misc.bar,misc.answers,news.answers Followup-To: misc.bar Subject: misc.bar Resource Guide Archive-name: bar/resource-guide ---------------- F. Posting frequency The frequency at which you choose to post is left to your discretion. Some maintainers find that monthly posting, with an Expires header to prevent postings from going away before their replacement is posted, is sufficient. Some other newsgroups are so busy that weekly posting is needed. If you choose to post more frequently than once per month, you might want to consider not cross-posting it to *.answers every time you post (this overrides our previously-expressed desire that you keep your Newsgroups line relatively static). Although it may be necessary to post in its home newsgroup(s) often to make sure new readers see it, for example, it is probably not necessary to post it in *.answers as frequently. [Note, however, that if you do this, you can't use Supersedes every time you post, since a posting in just the home newsgroup(s) should not supersede the posting in both the home newsgroup(s) and *.answers. You might then want to only use a Supersedes line in the version you cross-post to *.answers, and live with the fact that there might be multiple copies of your postings in the home newsgroup(s), which isn't that big a problem....] Another possibility is to post the complete informational posting(s) relatively infrequently, while posting a shorter pointer to it (e.g., providing instructions for getting it from archives) more frequently. Such postings, which only serve as reminders to other periodic informational postings, then would not need to be cross-posted into *.answers, but could be posted in the home newsgroups(s) as often as is deemed "necessary". When submitting your posting, please be sure to let us know the frequency at which you intend to post it to its home newsgroup(s), as well as the frequency at which you intend to cross-post it to *.answers (if different). The best way for this is to put this information into the Posting-Frequency lines of the auxiliary header -- you can describe your frequency in any format that a person reading it will understand. If possible, try to avoid posting your posting at a "predictable" time. For example, if you have decided to post it monthly, don't automatically decide to post it on the first of every month. This would cause a flood of postings in *.answers (and on the Usenet in general) at certain times of months, and would be big enough to overwhelm some smaller news sites and many readers of *.answers. Therefore, rather than picking the "obvious" time to post, pick some random time of the month to do your posting. ---------------- G. Mailing lists for periodic informational postings maintainers Maintainers of FAQs and other periodic informational postings are strongly urged to join the faq-maintainers mailing list, which is used for discussion about the *.answers newsgroups and the maintenance of Usenet periodic informational postings. Anyone is allowed to subscribe to these mailing lists -- in particular, you may subscribe before you even submit your posting to us. If you don't want to be on the discussion list, you may wish to join the faq-maintainers-announce list instead, which will be used only for announcements, instead. Note that subscribers to the faq-maintainers list automatically receive all messages sent to faq-maintainers-announce. Traffic on faq-maintainers tends to come in bursts -- it averages three to four messages per day, but during a burst there may be as many as several dozen messages in a few hours, and in between such bursts, there may be a week of no messages at all. Traffic on faq-maintainers-announce is very low (it is not unheard of for many months to pass with no messages sent to the list except for a periodic copy of the mailing lists policy document). When submitting your posting, make sure to let us know whether or not you want to be on one of the lists, or if you are already subscribed. It is best to let us know in a separate piece of email, rather than including it in the body of your posting when you first submit it, lest we not notice it in the body of your posting; also, please make clear you are asking to subscribe to one of these mailing lists (the *.answers moderators sometimes get random "subscribe" messages from people hoping they can get us to feed them news.answers via email). All other administrative requests related directly to the faq-maintainers or faq-maintainers-announce mailing lists should be sent to faq-maintainers-request@mit.edu. ---------------- H. List of Periodic Informational Postings Unless you tell us otherwise, we will add any postings submitted to *.answers to the "List of Periodic Informational Postings" (LoPIP) articles which appear in news.answers and news.lists. If you do not have copies of the LoPIP postings and would like to get them, to see what they're like or to check if your posting is already listed, see the instructions in Section IV. ---------------- I. Checklist Following is a checklist for your *.answers submission. Please go through all the questions; if you answer "no" to any of them, look at the relevant section of this article again, and correct your submission accordingly. Does the posting have a normal message header? Does the posting have a Newsgroups line? Does the Newsgroups line contain at least one newsgroup other than the *.answers newsgroups? Does the Newsgroups line contain news.answers? Are the *.answers newsgroups listed last on the Newsgroups line (with news.answers last of all)? Does the Newsgroups line contain all relevant *.answers newsgroups? Does the Newsgroups line contain only relevant *.answers newsgroups? Does the posting have a Subject line? Is the Subject line informative? Is important information on the Subject line near the beginning of the line? Does the posting have a Followup-To line? Does the Followup-To line omit all the *.answers newsgroups? Does the posting have a From or Reply-To line with a valid email address? Does the posting have an Archive-name line? Is the auxiliary header separated from the body of your posting by a blank line? Is the auxiliary header separated from the main header by a blank line? Is the Archive-name line valid? Have you told us the frequency of your posting? Have you told us whether you want to be on faq-maintainers or faq-maintainers-announce? ------------------------------ Subject: II. Submission instructions ---------------- A. How actually to submit your postings If you have a posting which you wish to submit to *.answers, you should first read the guidelines listed above and modify the headers of your posting to conform to them. Then, you should submit it by posting it cross-posted to all the newsgroups you would eventually like to post it to, assuming that the software on your site works properly and will then forward your posting to the *.answers newsgroups' moderator. Please include all the headers lines which you plan on using in the future, including all of the ones which are required by these guidelines. If you are taking over an existing posting (i.e., the old maintainer has given responsibility to you for posting), please remove any already existing approval headers before submission. Note that if you have not indicated moderator approval in the header of your posting, it will NOT show up in any newsgroup, even if you list other newsgroups on the Newsgroups line besides *.answers groups. Therefore, you CAN and SHOULD place all Newsgroups to which you intend to post in the Newsgroups line, in the order you intend them to be in when you post. Special case: If you want to eventually post to both *.answers AND one or more other moderated groups, you need separate approval from each of the separate moderators. Wait for approval from each (including us) before actually posting with approval. In this case, you should submit your posting to us via e-mail, because if you try to submit it by posting, it will probably be submitted to the moderator of the first moderated newsgroup on the Newsgroups line, which, if you've followed the guidelines correctly, will NOT be one of the *.answers newsgroups. In such a case, submit your posting to us by mailing it to the *.answers submission address, news-answers@MIT.EDU. ONLY SUBMISSIONS SHOULD BE MAILED TO THAT ADDRESS. The address news-answers-request@MIT.EDU should be used for all *.answers-related business except for actual submissions. If your posting does not contain a Posting-Frequency line in the auxillary header, please email us at news-answers-request@mit.edu telling us how often you plan to post. You should also ask any questions you may have, or make any comments or explanations by sending us email at that time. ---------------- B. What will we do with your submission We will respond, by agreeing that the posting belongs in *.answers as-is, or by asking you to make minor modifications to its headers in order to make it acceptable, or by rejecting it as inappropriate for *.answers. If you are asked to make modifications, please do so and resubmit the posting to us just as you did the first time. Note: the *.answers moderators are all volunteers, doing *.answers moderation in our (sometimes rare) spare time; we receive thousands of submissions, correspondence, and other email each month in our roles as *.answers moderators. Therefore, we can't always process submissions and other *.answers-related correspondence immediately. Please don't write to us asking whether we received your submission until at least 15 days after you submitted it. Because of the potential length of delays involved in getting your postings approved, in the meantime you will probably wish to continue posting your posting in its home newsgroup(s), on its regular schedule, so that it remains available to the readers there. Please do not send email to any individual moderator's address, even if he or she was the member of the moderation team who dealt with you most recently; this will only delay the processing of your submission. Always direct your questions, comments, or flames to news-answers-request@MIT.EDU for anything which is related to *.answers. ---------------- C. What next? Once a posting has been approved for *.answers, you will cross-post it directly to the group(s) yourself, by indicating in the header of the message that it was approved by the *.answers moderator, which we will explain how to do in our approval email to you. (Note that we are intentionally being somewhat vague about what this entails. When we approve your posting for *.answers, we will provide more specific instructions.) The *.answers moderators will NOT be posting your articles for you; it is up to you to do so. See Section III for instructions on what to do if you wish to change the headers of your posting. You do not need to notify us if you change the contents or style of the body of your post. ------------------------------ Subject: III. Post-approval considerations The following is a list of some situations which might occur AFTER your posting has been approved for *.answers, and what you need to do for each one. Note that if none of these situations occur, the *.answers moderators will expect you to continue posting your posting regularly, and there is no need to resubmit your posting just because you are regularly revising its CONTENTS. ---------------- A. Transfer a posting to a new maintainer The old maintainer should inform news-answers-request@mit.edu of the change in maintainers. The new maintainer should read this document (i.e., the "*.answers submission guidelines") and inform news-answers-request@mit.edu that he or she has done so. Furthermore, the new maintainer should resubmit the posting (MINUS THE NECESSARY APPROVAL HEADERS) even if there are no header changes planned except for the From and/or Reply-To lines, since we'd like to confirm that the new maintainer's news server doesn't munge headers. The new maintainer should wait for reapproval before posting for real with the necessary approval headers. ---------------- B. Change an posting's posting frequency Inform news-answers-request@mit.edu of the new frequency, unless you have a Posting-Frequency line in your auxiliary header; in that case, just change that line. You do not need to await reapproval from us. Please note that we only require notification if the posting frequency changes, not the actual posting date. For example, you do not need to notify us if you change your posting date from the 1st to the 6th day of the month, if our records indicate your posting frequency is "monthly". ---------------- C. Change an posting's header(s) 1. Subject line Inform news-answers-request@mit.edu of the new Subject line, or resubmit the entire posting to news-answers@mit.edu; in either case, wait for reapproval before posting, so that we can remove obsolete archived copies. 2. Newsgroups line Inform news-answers-request@mit.edu of the new Newsgroups line, or resubmit the entire posting to news-answers@mit.edu; in either case, wait for reapproval before posting, so that we can remove obsolete archived copies. This applies also if you are posting to new or renamed newsgroups. If a newsgroup has been split, or renamed, we still need you to tell us exactly what groups you will be posting to in the future. Wait for reapproval before crossposting the posting to *.answers from the new newsgroups. Also let us know if you will continue to post to the obsolete newsgroup for a few months. 3. From line, without changing maintainers If the From line of your post changes, inform news-answers-request@mit.edu of the new address before posting. Make sure you specify whether the change is permanent, or is a one-time exception. You do not need to wait for reapproval if you are not changing any of the other headers on your post, and are sure that the posting software at your new site will produce correct headers. 4. Archive-name line Inform news-answers-request@mit.edu and wait for reapproval before posting, so that we may remove obsolete archived copies. This applies also if you have any newsgroup-specific archive names in your posting and you wish to change them. 5. Followup-To line As long as it exists and doesn't contain any *.answers newsgroups in it, you don't have to tell us if you change its contents. 6. Other normal or auxilary header lines As long as you don't change the overall structure of your headers (e.g., make sure you keep an auxiliary header with the Archive-name line in it), you don't have to inform us about changes to other headers, or adding new headers. ---------------- D. Add parts to or delete parts from a "posting" 1. Split up a single-part posting Submit all the parts to news-answers@mit.edu, consulting Section II on sensible archive names and subject lines. Wait for approval before posting. 2. Add a new part to a posting which already has multiple parts Note: In order to reduce how often you need to ask for new parts, you might consider asking for more than just one new part approved at a time, thus making your postings individually smaller and giving them more room to grow. For example, if you post in 5 parts now to keep your postings below 64KB each, and you find you need a new part, you might ask us to approve 3 new parts (total of 8), and then your postings can grow by more than 100KB before you will need to ask us for a new part again. If you do this, please start using all the parts that you've gotten approved at once, i.e., don't ask for 3 new parts and then only expand to use the first new part at first, and then the second, and then the third. a. If the new part's headers are consistent with the other parts This means that that the Subject lines and archive names follow a pattern already established for your posting. For example, your Subject lines are in the form "foo FAQ part * of *" and your archive names look like "foo-faq/part*". The old parts might have their subjects changed because the "of *" changed, but that still matches the same pattern. Inform news-answers-request@mit.edu of the Subject lines of all parts with changed Subject lines, and the Subject line and archive name of the new part. Wait for approval before posting. b. If the new Subject or archive-name does not fit an established pattern Submit the new part and all significantly changed parts to news-answers@mit.edu. 3. Delete a part from a multi-part posting Inform news-answers-request@mit.edu. Wait for approval before posting if this will cause important changes in the other parts (changing subject lines from "foo part * of 20" to "foo part * of 15" does not count as an important change). 4. Add a diff posting Submit it to news-answers@mit.edu. If you already have a multi-part posting, choose the archive name to be consistent with the other ones. I.e., if your archive names look like "foo-faq/part*", an single diff posting for all parts should have the archive name "foo-faq/diff"; if you are providing separate diff postings for each part, they should have the archive names "foo-faq/diff*". If your posting had only one part before the change, add "/part1" to the archive name (e.g. "foo-faq/part1"), and submit both the posting and the diff posting. Wait for reapproval before posting the diff to *.answers. 5. Terminate an posting (i.e., stop posting it forever) Inform news-answers-request@mit.edu. ---------------- E. Cancel one of your postings If you made a mistake (for example, perhaps you posted one of your articles multiple times by accident), and you want to get the article canceled, send us email at news-answers-request@mit.edu with the Subject line "Urgent: cancel needed". Specify your article's Subject line, Newsgroups, Message-ID (if convenient), and what went wrong such that you need the article canceled. You won't be able to cancel the article normally as you might from your news reader software. ---------------- F. Create a new posting Submit it to *.answers following the guidelines in sections I and II above, just like you submitted your previous posting(s). ------------------------------ Subject: IV. Other Related Documents ---------------- This document assumes familiarity with the contents of the "Introduction to the *.answers newsgroups" posting. Subject: Introduction to the *.answers newsgroups Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.answers,.... It is available in the indicated Usenet newsgroups, or via anonymous FTP from rtfm.mit.edu [18.181.0.24] in the file: /pub/usenet/news.answers/news-answers/introduction It is also available from mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu by sending a mail message containing: send usenet/news.answers/news-answers/introduction ---------------- There are fifteen "List of Periodic Informational Postings" postings. Part 1 contains introductory information. Subject: List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part */15 Newsgroups: news.lists,news.answers They are available in the indicated Usenet newsgroups, or via anonymous FTP from rtfm.mit.edu [18.181.0.24] in the files: /pub/usenet/news.answers/periodic-postings/* They are also available from mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu by sending a mail message containing: send usenet/news.answers/periodic-postings/* If you want to find out more about the mail server, send a message to it containing "help" in the body of the message. ------------------------------ Subject: V. This posting 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. Many people have in the past provided feedback and corrections; we thank them for their input. Remaining ambiguities, errors, and difficult-to-read passages are not their fault. :) ---------------- 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) -- the *.answers moderation team ------------------------------ End of "*.answers submission guidelines" Digest ***********************************************