woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (08/31/89)
I am going to be on a 4-day camping trip over the Labor Day weekend. I will be leaving around noon Thursday and won't be able to post any articles to this group until Monday night. This brings up something I hadn't thought about before, which is what happens when I go on vacation. Many articles posted to this group are time critical, in that they contain dates when discussion, waiting, or voting periods will start and/or end. This is because the authors are desiring to comply with the time periods stated in the guidelines, which also require that the times be posted. Now, 99% of the time this is not a problem, because we are a well-connected site and I look for n.a.ng articles a couple of times per day (and at least once over the weekend), so there has never been a delay longer than a day or two between the author sending the article and the article appearing in this group (assuming the article was accepted on first reading). Now, however, there could be a delay as long as 4 days, which could be significant, since the waiting period after a successful vote announcement is only 5 days. It wouldn't make much sense to post an article on Monday which says that the error-correction period for a vote starts Thursday and ends Tuesday. This would defeat the purpose of having the error-correction period in the first place. So, this is what I plan to do. I will, if necessary, change the dates in posted articles to reflect the reality of when they actually appear, if it is necessary. For example, if someone starts a 30-day voting period on Friday and the article doesn't get posted until Monday, I hardly think it will matter if the voting period is a couple of days short. The important thing about votes is to announce when they will END in the call for votes. However in the waiting period example above, I would change the dates and start the waiting period the day I actually post the article. Hopefully, the number of times I have to change the dates will be so small that I won't get flamed for it (nah, this is USENET; someone is sure to flame anyway :-) If I do find it necessary to change the dates, I will make a note to that effect at the beginning of the article. I can minimize the times I have to do this by finding a backup moderator for times when I am not available for an extended period, although it is obviously too late to do this for this weekend because it would have to be someone that is acceptable to me and also acceptable to most of the rest of the net, and finding such a person will take longer than the 24 hours left. There will also be times when even a backup moderator is also likely to be on vacation (e.g. Labor Day weekend, Memorial Day weekend, the last week of December, etc.) I could ask people not to make newsgroup proposals during that time, but no one would listen :-) For this weekend I have no choice but to make the decision unilaterally on how to handle it. If there is a storm of protest over the possibility that 1% of the articles in n.a.ng might have the dates changed, and if there are any other reasonable alternatives suggested that I haven't thought of, I will consider another course of action next time. I apologize for the necessity of posting admistrativia here. Hopefully once this group gets into full swing, and the unanticipated problems are ironed out, the need to do this will be minimal. --Greg
woods@snowmass.scd.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (12/22/89)
I will be on vacation from noon Friday, Dec. 22, until Wednesday morning, Dec. 27. Any news.announce.newgroups articles which arrive on my machine after Friday morning will not get posted until Wednesday morning. Please bear this in mind if your article contains dates for a discussion period, a voting period, or particularly a newsgroup creation. --Greg
woods@snowmass.scd.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (01/17/90)
This is the last posting from me in this group for the next 3 weeks. During my absence, Eliot Lear (lear@net.bio.net) will be moderating the group. No one needs to make any changes; the submission address is still "announce-newgroups@ncar.ucar.edu". Postings sent there will be forwarded to one of Eliot's machines where he has requested me to send postings. Postings sent to my personal mailbox, as some of you continue to do despite repeated requests not to, will NOT get posted because there will be no one here to post them. Please do NOT send postings to Eliot's personal mailbox either. We get enough mail without the added hassle of filtering out news.announce.newgroups postings. Please send postings through the usual posting mechanism, or if you must mail them send to the above submission address. Thanks. --Greg