| < Software | Russ Allbery | Technical Notes > |
A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"
Here are a variety of FAQs that I maintain, either alone or jointly with other people. Pretty much all of the pages here were automatically generated by my text to HTML converter, so if you see any oddities in the HTML please do report them. It's probably a bug.
My personal request for people to ask their technical questions in the appropriate newsgroups or mailing lists rather than mailing them to me (or any other perceived expert) directly, including the reasons why this is a much better approach for everyone involved.
An explanation for why my personal journal doesn't support comments, written here so that I can refer to it in journal posts and sidebars.
A list of potential pitfalls of moderated groups, in the form of a list of questions for moderated group proponents, prospective moderators, and potential readers and posters to moderated groups. These are the things you should be thinking about up-front when considering a moderated group, but which you may not be aware are even issues.
Attempts to provide help to Usenet hierarchy administrators, the people who try to maintain the canonical lists of newsgroups in managed hierarchies. It is aimed at the hierarchy administrators rather than at news admins and tries to summarize the issues to consider in making it easy for news admins to carry the hierarchy.
This was the old Big Eight newsgroup creation process document, a replacement for the venerable "Guidelines for Usenet Group Creation" by Greg Woods, Gene Spafford, and David Lawrence. It documents the old voting process for creating a new newsgroup in the Big Eight Usenet hierarchies (comp.*, humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.*). This process is no longer used, but is retained here for historical interest.
The FAQ and posting guidelines for rec.arts.comics.creative. I inherited this from Jeff McCoskey, and it's benefited greatly from the input of many other people.
Posting guidelines for rec.games.roguelike.announce, a moderated newsgroup for announcements about roguelike games.
The INN 2.x FAQ. Note that this FAQ was developed independently from the old INN FAQ that can still be found in various places around the Internet and is intended only for users of INN 2.0 and later, not for users of INN 1.x.
There are several private Usenet hierarchies, including Usenet II, that require participating sites to be "sound", namely to only accept articles from other participating sites and possibly that meet certain sets of criteria. This details how to do that with various different news servers.
qmail has a sufficiently different philosophy from sendmail that the standard Majordomo installation and setup instructions need extensive changes. This details how I personally set up Majordomo under qmail, and contains links to various resources that people may find useful.
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