At the current time we don't really have a supported way for someone
who has submitted something to us to AUTOMATICALLY query the exact
status of the submission. If your acquaintance submitted something to
us in the last several months (since mid-February), he or she should
have received a return-receipt message, as documented in the *.answers
submission guidelines since mid-April. If they did not receive the
auto-reply, then they may safely assume we never got their submission.
If they had tried to submit it to us by posting but it failed to get
to us, they should try to submit it to us via email to
news-answers@MIT.EDU. If they had submitted via email, and they
received neither a bounce message nor an auto-reply after a few days,
then something probably went considerably wrong --- either we've
disabled the auto-replier temporarily due to mailer loop problems, or
your acquaintance cannot reliably send email from his or her site.
I'll admit the obvious to those of you who have seen the auto-reply
message, which is that the current auto-replier DOES give a count of
how many messages are in the main incoming queue and what the date of
the earliest of those messages are. However, we discourage submitters
from sending us email simply to ask when their submission is going to
be processed, since that simply adds more email to our queue, which is
already daunting enough. (Perhaps at some point, in our Copious Spare
Time[TM], we'll create and support a special auto-replier which can be
used to obtain that kind of info, without adding unnecessary
additional load to the queue and moderator mail inboxes.)
Ping Huang, member of the *.answers moderation team
news-answers-request@MIT.EDU
P.S. I would have replied sooner to your query, but I just returned
from a week's worth of vacation after commencement, and one of the
other seasoned moderators has been cleaning up after we've been
bombarded by hundreds of duplicated postings (totaling scores of
megabytes) spewed from several different sites this past week.
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