Faq

Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Faq shopping experience:

1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Faq offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Faq at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.

2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about

3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Faq? Wrong! If the Faq is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.

4. Questions - Got a question about Faq then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....

5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Faq? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Faq and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.

6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Faq wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.

7. Feedback - happy with your Faq then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.

8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Faq site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site

9. Contact - got a question about Faq, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.

10. Payment - ready to pay for your Faq, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.

FAQ is an initialism for "Frequently Asked Question(s)". The term refers to listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. Since the acronym originated in textual media, its pronunciation varies; "fak", "faks" and "F.A.Q." are commonly heard. Depending on usage, the term may refer specifically to a single frequently-asked question, or to an assembled list of many questions and their answers.

Origins While the name may be recent, the FAQ format itself is quite old. For instance, Matthew Hopkins wrote The Discovery of Witches in 1647 in FAQ format. He introduces it as "Certaine Queries answered," ... Many old catechisms are in a question and answer (Q&A) format.

The FAQ is an Internet textual tradition originating from a combination of mailing list-laziness plus speculation and a separate technical and political need within NASA in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On the SPACE mailing list, the presumption was that new users would ftp archived past messages. In practice, this never happened. Instead, the dynamic on mailing lists was for users to speculate rather than use very basic original sources (contacting NASA which was not part of DARPA and had only one site on the ARPANET) to get simple answers. Repeating the "right" answers becomes tedious. A series of different measures from regularly posted messages to netlib-like query mailing daemons were set up by loosely affiliated groups of computer system administrators. The acronym FAQ was developed in 1983 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list (Miya notes that Mark Horton's "18 question" periodic post (PP)happened concurrent to the SPACE FAQ, although it was not labelled with the word FAQ). The format was then picked up on other mailing lists. Posting frequency changed to monthly, and finally weekly and daily across a variety of mailing lists and newsgroups. The first person to post a weekly FAQ was Jef Poskanzer to the Usenet net.graphics/ comp.graphics newsgroups. Eugene Miya experimented with the first daily FAQ. The first FAQ were initially attacked by some mailing list users for being repetitive.

On Usenet, Mark Horton started a series of "Periodic Posts" (PP) which attempted to answer trivia terminology such as "What is 'foobar'?" with appropriate answer. Periodic summary messages posted to Usenet newsgroups attempted to reduce the continual reposting of the same basic questions and associated wrong answers. On Usenet, posting questions which are covered in a group's FAQ is often considered poor netiquette, as it shows that the poster has not done the expected background reading before asking others to provide answers. Some groups may have multiple FAQ on related topics, or even two or more competing FAQ explaining a topic from different points of view.

Another factor on early ARPANET mailing lists was netiquette, wherein people asking questions typically "promised to 'summarize' received answers." Rarely were these summaries more than mere concatenations of received electronic replies with little to no quality checking.

The initialism FAQ possibly started as a contrived three-letter abbreviation with an auditory similarity to the word "facts," ('i.e.,' a statement "check the FAQs" echoes "check the facts.") Arguably the word was deliberately intended to stand for the secret pronunciation "fah-queue". In this sense FAQ may have some passive-aggressive genesis from computer tech support specialists, frustrated with answering over and over the same, perceived stupid questions from computer users, and thus along the same lines as the infamous ID-Ten-T Error.

Modern developments Originally the term FAQ referred to the Frequently Answered Questions, and listed answers that had previously been posted to the mailing list. The word now is usually considered Frequently Asked Question and the compilation of questions and answers was known as a FAQ list or some similar expression. Today "FAQ" is more frequently used to refer to the list, and a text consisting of questions and their answers is often called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked (if asked at all). This is done to capitalize on the fact that the concept of a FAQ has become fairly familiar online - documents of this kind are sometimes called FAAQs (Frequently Asked and Anticipated Questions).

In some cases informative documents not in the traditional FAQ style have also been called FAQs, videogame FAQs in particular. A number of online repositories of videogame FAQs have emerged in recent years (such as CheatCodes.com and GameFAQs), where most so-called "FAQs" have nothing in common with the meaning of the name, but are often instead rather detailed descriptions of gameplay, including tips, secrets, and beginning-to-end guidance. Rarely are videogame FAQs in a question-and-answer format, although they may contain a short section of questions and answers in this format.

Over time, the accumulated FAQ across all USENET news groups sparked the creation of the "*.answers" moderated newsgroups such as comp.answers, misc.answers, sci.answers, etc. for crossposting and collecting FAQ across respective comp.*, misc.*, sci.* newsgroups.

The term "FAQ", and the idea behind it, has spread offline as well, even to areas not related to the Net at all. Even bottles of bicycle chain lubricant have been marketed with accompanying leaflets titled as a "FAQ".

There are thousands of FAQs available on many subjects. Several sites catalog them and provide search capabilities—for example, the Internet FAQ Consortium.

In the World Wide Web, FAQ nowadays tend to be stored in content management systems (Content management system), or in simple text files. Since 1998, a high number of specialized software has emerged, mostly written in Perl or PHP. Some of them are integrated in more complex software applications, others, like phpMyFAQ can be both run as a stand-alone-FAQ and integrated into web applications.

Not "really" frequently asked? The Dilbert comic strip has a recurring theme that reinforces the perception that often FAQs are not truly "frequently" asked questions via parody. Dogbert intentionally writes FAQs to be as obscure and useless as possible. Many corporate websites can be seen as the source for this gag, since some of their FAQs are nearly as obscure and far from a regular user's mind as the Dogbert versions are. Usability experts Jakob Nielsen (usability consultant) and Steve Krug (in Don't Make Me Think) have mentioned this in their writings, that too often these FAQs are written from an internal vantage point in place of putting true thought into the user's perspective and what information typical users may want and need.

One example of this is the on-line FAQ for the Douglas Adams computer game "Starship Titanic", which included the question "Where did I leave my keys?". References

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/it_faq_history.htm