An obvious solution would be to set up a robot responder which replies
to first-time posters with a pointer to the location of the FAQ etc.
This is in place in a number of groups; the only one I've been "hit"
by myself is comp.lang.perl.misc but I think there must be hundreds of
them already.
Tangentially, this is something I've been thinking of setting up in
some newsgroups myself, groups where I'm not even a regular poster,
much less FAQ maintainer, but which seem to be in a dire need.
(comp.unix.shell is one good example -- I'd say in excess of 50% of
the threads are redundant, the questions being perfectly well
explained in the FAQ -- which, however, is pretty big and perhaps a
bit intimidating).
This touches on the issue of spamming as well, in a way. I could
imagine that some people could get upset over receiving an
"unsolicited" automated reply just because they posted something in a
newsgroup.
The other problem I perceive, which is common to any kind of FAQ, is
that one of the really burning issues is that people don't understand
netiquette and that all of this would be unnecessary if they learned
manners first. So, there is always a big temptation to turn any FAQ or
automated response into more of a netiquette lesson. This is not very,
uh, sympatic IMHO, but I see no easy way to avoid netiquette issues
completely, either. Any thoughts on this?
I used to have a copy of the message that gets posted to anyone who
posts to comp.lang.perl.misc, which in turn has a pointer to the home
page of the "save a newsgroup today" project (or similar; Alta Vista
found nothing relevant with these search terms) ... Can anybody else
provide the URL? (You should probably not send a "testing testing"
message to clpm just to get the automated reply ;^)
/* era */
-- Defin-i-t-e-ly. Sep-a-r-a-te. Gram-m-a-r. <http://www.iki.fi/~era/> * Enjoy receiving spam? Register at <http://www.iki.fi/~era/spam.html>
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