Re: ietf-nntp FAQ Extension to NNTP

[Jean van Waterschoot <[e-mail]>]

>It was suggested to me that I submit my ideas on including FAQ's as part of
>news groups to this mailing list. I've put together this idea in the form
>of an internet draft, which is shown below. 
>
>Very briefly, the idea is that NNTP be extended to allow clients to
>retrieve the latest FAQ. User Interfaces could provide an option that would
>allow the user to read that FAQ at anytime, just as if he or she were
>reading an article.
>
>This eliminates that need to post updated FAQ's periodically as articles;
>it also elimiates the need for users to first find out the name of the FAQ
>file and then retrieve it through anonymous FTP. 

I agree that it is very bad practice to distribute the FAQ in the
newsgroups themselves. Most people that frequent the newsgroup are not
interested in the FAQ anyway, it is only for those who just joined the
newsgroup. It would be much better to just put a pointer to the FAQ in a
message. No bandwidth wasted....

It is very easy to get the FAQ of any newsgroup today, my newsreader has a
FAQ button and retrieves it through E-mail which works perfectly for those
groups that have a FAQ.

Here is such a request for the c.i.w.b.m group:

To: [e-mail]
Subject: FAQ request

size 0
send usenet-by-hierarchy/comp/infosystems/www/browsers/ms-windows/*
quit

The advantages are clear, there is no unnecessary traffic to get the FAQ.
The server reports if there is no FAQ  albeit in a cryptic form.

What I consider more important is that the "newsgroup descriptions" are
automatically propagated to all servers and contain more information about
the charter of a newsgroup. As I understand it today that file is manually
copied by a system manager and is ofcourse only helpful for groups that
have been around for a long time.

So please do not put the FAQ on each and every NNTP server there is. With
20,000+ groups and a typical FAQ size of around 50K you need another 1GB of
storage for stuff that is almost never accessed on each individual server.

All FAQs belong in a central place, and should be accessible through
E-mail, FTP and the WWW.

Jean. ([e-mail])
http://www.mcs.net/~jvwater