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From: paul@heino.ibh.rwth-aachen.de (Paul Foerster)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.ascii,alt.ascii-art,alt.binaries.pictures.ascii
Subject: Talk: Who reads FAQs anyway - I DO!
Date: 7 Dec 1994 10:23:18 -0600
Organization: Institut fuer Bergwerks- und Huettenmaschinenkunde
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My news readers says that messina@engin.umich.edu (Matt Messina) writes:
>Bob Allison <boba@wwa.com> wrote:
>>   Unfortunately, many people (including myself at times) don't want to 
>>bother reading a FAQ.  It's too bad 'cause a lot of folks supplied info 
>>to make the ASCII ART FAQ fairly solid.  You can learn an awful lot from 
>>the FAQ (especially the longer versions).

... voting for the creation of this group and reading it now from the very 
beginning i have to say that i like the FAQ. It is well organized and Bob 
obviously spent a lot of time maintaining it :-)

>This might be because many FAQs are *huge* (e.g. the ASCII Art FAQ). 

... ok, it _IS_ huge. But you'll find everything there that you want to know. 
The FAQ is divided in chapters which exactly tells you in a clear way what to 
do and you only have to look for the specific chapter containing the answer to 
the question. So it is not necessary to read _EVERYTHING_ said there.

>I think you ought to consider moving the "Where can I find ASCII Art?"
>question to a seperate document. 

... i would not do this. This only stops people from reading it because they 
have to get it separately.

>Also, there seem to be many questions that are not about ASCII Art, but
>are about using computers and the net.  These are legitimate questions,
>but they are answered in other FAQs. 

>Yeah, yeah, yeah, these questions are asked in inappropriate groups (e.g.,
>this one), but people who do that don't read FAQs anyway.

... ok, they're answered elsewhere but if all the people asking there 
questions would scan thru the other groups they wouldn't ask here. This means 
that the answers to these questions _NEED_ to be in the FAQ too. And i 
wouldn't be too sure about people asking anyway and skip reading the FAQ. 
Since the creation of the group many people asked how to uudecode etc., but 
when the answers to these questions appeared in the FAQ, asking for this sort 
of things became much less. And today there are only a few people asking these 
questions and they'll get the answer "rtfm" :-) So they can look up everything 
they want.

>How about splitting the FAQ into 3 articles when you post it?  There 
>could be a "Questions about ASCII Art" section, a "Where to find ASCII 
>Art" section, and a "How to make a .plan, use FTP, etc." section.

... yes, i'd like this one too. The FAQ obviously grows _TOO_ large. And even 
worse the same thing applies to the web-version. My mosaic version (mosaic for 
windows version 2 alpha 7) for some reason does not like documents being that 
long. No it obviously is no memory problem. It's an internal problem of the 
program. So i'd like to see the web-version being split up too. How about it, 
Bob?

>Any comments?
>--
>Matt Messina
>messina@umich.edu

Cheers,

Paul



--

                .odbo.
            .od88888888bo.                  Paul Foerster
        .od8888888888888888bo.
    .od888888888888888888888888bo.          paul@heino.ibh.rwth-aachen.de
 od88888888888888888888888888888888bo
  `~888888888888888888888888888888~'
     `~888888888888888888888888~'|          "Beam me up Scotty, there's no
        `~888888888888888888~'   |              intelligent life down here!"
          |`~888888888888~'|     |
          \   `~888888~'   /     A
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