Re: [Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>] Re: FAQ Buttons on Newsreaders (was FAQ sites on the web?)

[John Griffith <griffith@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de>]

>>>>> "LMI" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no> writes:

    LMI> Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com> writes:
    >> `List of Periodic Postings'.  It's a guide to FAQs, and is
    >> periodically posted to news.answers and news.lists.

    LMI> So Gnus should sniff that post to find the Subjects for the FAQs in
    LMI> the groups and then be able to get the FAQ posting for the group?
    LMI> *perspire*.  Let's see...  Fetch all headers from news.answers, find
    LMI> article, go through article, fetch all headers from current group,
    LMI> find the matching subject, fetch article.  *perspire*.

But you could keep a cache so you don't have to do this the next time.
Then every now and then you could just check to see if there's a new
one and either rebuild or merge the changes (I think there is a diff
file posted as well.)

There are some other interesting postings as well as web pages with
(near) machine readable regularity like newsgroup and mailing list
archives sites and the list of publicly accessible mailing lists.
Imagine being able to bring your mail server to its knees by
subscribing to lots of high volume mailing lists with just a few mouse
clicks.  But Gnus giveth and Gnus taketh away.  If your mail server
doesn't crash then all of the mail from those lists could be
automatically split into there own mailboxes.  Automatic mailing list
subscription might even come with a liberal default expiry policy.