"Bradly J. Barton" wrote:
>
> Hey folks, I just noticed a question go by that's on that wonderful little
> FAQ and a question came to mind for the Palm folks that monitor:
>
> What are the odds of putting the link to that FAQ at the bottom of every
> message along with the unsubscribe information?
I figured I should weigh in on this topic with a few observations:
1. Palm's developer site is by far the broadest in scope. It's not a
FAQ, it's a knowledge base, and that's by design I'm sure.
2. Adam Wozniak's FAQ is very short and terse, good for periodic
postings directly to these newsgroups.
3. Wade Hatzler's old FAQ, which I've taken over, is almost a complete
superset of Adam's, but a tiny subset of Palm's. Its natural home is
the web, so the best way to refer to it is to point people to it, rather
than post its contents here in full or just as quotes. I will try to do
this whenever I see an opportunity.
In my experience, putting a link to any of these FAQs at the bottom of
each message won't be the right answer. There are people who never
check the FAQs before they ask a question. The best thing you can do
with these people is to refuse to answer their question: either ignore
it completely, or point them to one of the FAQs.
I'm also not a fan of giving out deep pointers: just tell people what
site has their answer. While searching for it they may discover other
useful things. If you give them a deep link, they may not look at the
rest of the info. Being the people they are, they will later ask
another f.a.q., and the deep linkers will have to give out another easy
click-and-read pointer. At best, I will give out a FAQ item number,
forcing them to click through my FAQ's main page to get to the info --
I'm hoping they'll glance at the other FAQ items as they navigate to
their immediate goal.
--
= Warren Young -- Maintainer of the Palm OS Programmer's FAQ at:
= http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/palm/faq/
=
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m
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