From: emhavens@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <199610192112.RAA23145@opus.MIT.EDU>
To: <bgoffe@whale.st.usm.edu>
Reply-To: news-answers-request@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [news.answers] Economists' Resources on the Internet 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 01 Oct 1996 13:17:34 CDT."
             <199610011817.NAA09701@cook.cba.usm.edu> 
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 17:12:09 EDT

> It turns out I do it approximately quarterly; not sure where the monthly
> figure came from (perhaps from it early days some 3 years ago?). Perhaps
> this is why the current version is no longer at rtfm even though this
> one doesn't expire for another month or so? Was going to track this down,
> but since the new one will be out soon (see below), decided not to look
> into it.

The expiration date on a posting is for news purposes only.  The FAQs
get stored on rtfm as normal files, so they never expire.  We go through
our archives, though, and look for files that are more than a few months
old.  If you tell us that you will be posting less often than we look
through the archives, however, we won't send you mail asking about your
FAQ, like we did this time.  If you want to change the posting
frequency, you should let us know so we can change the database.

> At any rate, it is certainly still actively maintained. The next one will
> be ready in about 2 weeks.

Cool.  :)

> A question -- as it has gotten quite a bit larger, I'd like to split
> it up into parts when I post it (to be honest,. Do I need permission to 
> do so?

To split into more than one part, you need to change your Archive-name
and Subject line.  Each part has to have all the headers of a normal
news.answers posting.  The subject has to contain information about
which part it is and the total number of parts, so each respective part
would end up looking something like:

Subject: Economists' Resources on the Internet (part 1/2)
or
Subject: Economists' Resources on the Internet (part 2/2)

Your archive name will be similar.  So, they should be something like:

Archive-name: econ-resources-faq/part1
or
Archive-name: econ-resources-faq/part2

Probably the best thing to do would be to resubmit both parts to
news-answers-request@mit.edu in the way you would post them, and then we
can check the parts to make sure you did everything right.

> Come to think of it, a suggestion -- would it be possible to maintain 
> records of how many times it has been accessed? As this is part of my
> professional responsibilities, it would be quite nice to know how often
> it is accessed so I can report this to my "masters."

This would theoretically be possible, but frankly, it would be a pain.
We'd have to make a script to grep through all our mail-server and ftp
logs and either send the information to you or make it accessible to
you, which we can't do.  Doing a one-time thing might be ok, though.

> Finally, thanks for all your work with maintianing this archive. It is
> certainly very much appreciated.

You're welcome!

Emily Havens
one of the *.answers moderators
news-answers-request@mit.edu