breathes down newcomers' necks

[Amy Z]

I'm not a Mod, but someone had to say it.

Various things (oh no!  a combined post!  the bane of
FAQers everywhere!):

Welcome to the dark, Satanic mill of HP4GU-FAQ,
newbies!  Here you will languish for months, counting
the drips from the stone dungeon ceiling, culling
posts at the rate of 10 per day while the list
generates them at the rate of 50, meaning that you'll
be finished in the year A.D. Fifth Order of Magnitude
of Infinity.

Oh wait, no, that is no longer true!  Thanks to the
combined genius of Paul "It's not MY doing that we're
pushing 50,000, I've only posted nine times" Kippes
and Cindy "I know nothing technical, I swear" C., we
may actually get on top of these things before OoP
comes out.  Or maybe that IS in the year A.D. Fifth
Order of Magnitude of Infinity.

Anyway, I heartily endorse the whole plan.  Basically,
we are creating an index of the entire thing--WOW. 
Great idea!  I just have a wee little suggestion.  Can
we do the old messages as well?  I know it adds
tremendously to the task, but there really were lots
of gems back before 25,000.  Naturally my plea has
nothing whatever to do with the fact that when Elkins
and I divvied up the list to write our FAQ (Lupin), I
took the Archive list and early posts of the main
list.  Nope.

Now, I do have a few thoughts on how to make this
easier.  First, we do leave those for later, doing the
more recent chunks first.  This raises a
question--what about those who are currently slogging
through older posts, like me?  It seems silly for me
to do this and only cull Lupin, when I could be
culling everything.  The problem is that I will never
finish if I do that.  Perhaps the FAQ we are now
writing should deal only with 25,000 onwards <feels a
pang> and any revision will wait until we work back to
indexing those earlier posts?  I'm getting
fuzzy-headed here and could use some clarity.

Second, remember that OT posts were allowed until,
what was it, around March, 2001.  So a lot of the
earlier stuff is just plain OT.  I suggest that any
post that would be ruled OT today gets ignored in the
indexing process.  Those who really crave to know
about the very first spotted dick question can look it
up using the search engine, darn it.

Back to the Word table.  I think we need a feedback
process so that we start to agree on common language. 
Otherwise we'll come up with lots of different names
for the same thing.  Can we have a Subject Headings
file where we throw in all the things we come up with
(just the headings, mind you, not the posts they
describe) and then someone can look at them once a
week or so and say "OK, let's take 'Point of View,'
'Narrative Perspective,' and 'Third Person Limited'
and call them all 'Point of View'"?  I'm not sure how
that would work...  Maybe we should just use the
Library of Congress headings?

Amy
half-serious (but all Remus)

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