Frequently asked questions in these groups deserve a monthly posting

[David Elliott]

In article <810059 at hpsemc.HP.COM> gph at hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) writes:
>sahayman at iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) writes:
>Well, I disagree.  Yeah, every once in a while somebody out there get's his
>nose out of joint because he has seen the same question twice.   Well, that's
>too bad.   I learn a lot from this group.  I wade through a lot of crud that
>isn't of the slightest interest to me.  It doesn't bother me.  I also answer
>questions with answers that I have gotten from this group.   I think that
>it is serving it's purpose.  

Oh, yeah.  It's *much* better to have this scenario start a couple of
times a month:

	1. Person asks a simple question which has been answered
	   many times in the last 10 years

	2. Some group of people reply by mail answering the question;
	   some right, some wrong.

	3. Some group of people post answers to the question; some
	   right, some wrong.

	4. Some group of people post followups to these wrong answers,
	   correcting them.

>I definitely DONT think you should start discouraging people from asking
>questions by flaming them for posting questions that have been posted
>before.   How are they going to know?   And I sure don't want some 
>self important #*&@(*$ weeding out information that I might need because
>he has seen it before.   

Nobody is flaming anyone.  In fact, such a posting could very well
reduce the amount of flaming.  The current version of the proposed
monthly posting does in fact ask that people not flame, but that
they simply refer the person asking the question to the monthly
posting.

Nobody is saying "don't ask questions".  My personal opinion is
that what the monthly posting does is to say "don't post answers to
questions that have been answered a lot, and if you do, here's a set of
correct answers".

As far as "self important #*&@(*$s", nobody is weeding out anything,
least of all information you might need.  In fact, you should be
thankful that someone is taking the time to answer the question
correctly for you, instead of taking the chance that this week's
new Unix hacker is giving you a correct answer.

>All you are going to do with this course of action is limit the excellent
>communication that goes on in this group.  I am definitely against it.

If you call the scenario I showed above "excellent communication", then
I agree, it will limit that.

You say above that you don't mind wading through crud that doesn't
interest you.  Well, if the monthly posting doesn't work, then you'll
have one more posting of crud per month that you can ignore.  If it
does, maybe the signal to noise ratio of this group will increase to
a point where there's no crud to wade through.

-- 
David Elliott		dce at Solbourne.COM
			...!{boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dce