There some interesting writing from Joel Spolsky on these types of FAQs :
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-madden...> When Jeff and I were talking about the initial design of Stack Overflow, I told him about this popular Usenet group for the C programming language in the 1980s. It was called comp.lang.c.
> C is a simple and limited programming language. You can get a C compiler that fits in 100K. So, when you make a discussion group about C, you quickly run out of things to talk about.
> Also. In the 1990s, C was a common language for undergraduates who were learning programming. And, in fact, said undergraduates would have very basic problems in C. And they might show up on comp.lang.c asking their questions.
> And the old-timers on comp.lang.c were bored. So bored. Bored of the undergraduates showing up every September wondering why they can’t return a local char array from a function et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Every damn September.
> The old timers invented the concept of FAQs. They used them to say “please don’t ask things that have been asked before, ever, in the history of Usenet” which honestly meant that the only questions they really wanted to see were so bizarre and so esoteric that they were really enormously boring to 99% of working C programmers. The newsgroup languished because it catered only to the few people that had been there for a decade.
The modern equivalent would probably be sorting StackOverflow questions by votes.
> When Jeff and I were talking about the initial design of Stack Overflow, I told him about this popular Usenet group for the C programming language in the 1980s. It was called comp.lang.c.
> C is a simple and limited programming language. You can get a C compiler that fits in 100K. So, when you make a discussion group about C, you quickly run out of things to talk about.
> Also. In the 1990s, C was a common language for undergraduates who were learning programming. And, in fact, said undergraduates would have very basic problems in C. And they might show up on comp.lang.c asking their questions.
> And the old-timers on comp.lang.c were bored. So bored. Bored of the undergraduates showing up every September wondering why they can’t return a local char array from a function et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Every damn September.
> The old timers invented the concept of FAQs. They used them to say “please don’t ask things that have been asked before, ever, in the history of Usenet” which honestly meant that the only questions they really wanted to see were so bizarre and so esoteric that they were really enormously boring to 99% of working C programmers. The newsgroup languished because it catered only to the few people that had been there for a decade.
The modern equivalent would probably be sorting StackOverflow questions by votes.