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(FAQ)  

How do I find the FAQ (and/or the charter) of a newsgroup?


The very first thing to do, naturally, is to browse through the newsgroup's old postings to see if the FAQ or a pointer to the FAQ is being regularly posted to the newsgroup. But that is far from always the case. The next step is to search the FAQs By Newsgroup repository.

Unfortunately, things are not necessarily quite this simple. While you may readily find the main FAQ of a particular Usenet newsgroup this way, there may be alternative FAQs. Even more importantly there are a lot of relevant FAQs which do not tie in with a particular newsgroup, or are only a subsection of that newsgroup. In that case you might try to find the FAQ and other material relating to your subject by using a search engine like Altavista and Google or a human edited subjects' link collection like dmoz Open Directory Project.
A related, frequent question is where to find the charter of a newsgroup. Similar answers apply. First, check the newsgroup's postings from a reasonable period of time. If the charter or the pointer to the charter can't be found there, next try the archive of all control messages received since early 1991. Be forewarned, though, that this is a huge repository, so browsing it will require some skill and patience.
 
Another option for finding the charter of a newsgroup is using the Google Usenet news repository. Of course this is good only for cases where the newsgroup creation process  has taken place within the timeframe of Google back-issues. For example consider finding the charter of the Usenet newsgroup rec.photo.digital.zlr. At Advanced Groups Search enter in the field "with all of the words" the following search string "rec.photo.digital.zlr". In the field "with the exact phrase" enter "Last call for votes". This procedure will point you to the requested posting.
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