knutsen@sri-unix.UUCP (08/06/83)
After observing the fray here for awhile, I thought I might as
well put in a contribution...
Re usage statistics, I think they are useful and interesting;
but they should be computed at more than one site. In particular, it
would be good if various sites could compare their newsgroups loadings
to see how well our distributed database is being kept consistent. I
have a little program (included below) which derives this stuff from a
B news history file, and our results are a bit different from the ones
recently seen here. For instance, unix-wizards is quite a ways out in
front of jokes.
I have one theory why this might happen: a lot of the unix-wizards
stuff comes from the arpanet, and perhaps either rlgvax isnt getting
the stuff from the arpanet or RA's program isnt counting it. In either
case Id be interested to know, because Im responsible for the gateway.
Any comments on the desirability of the gatewayed material is also
welcome... but dont expect any big changes without a vote of some
sort.
One final comment on the statistics: I noticed that sri-unix
(my current site) was at the top of the per-site list. I dont
think this was due any especial prolificacy (prolificness?) on the
part of the users here; rather, during the sample period a lot of
stuff that had been trapped in our notesfile system was released.
Re Usenet Inc: I say leave it as it is. Lets not have anybody
telling anyone what to do with their money, and lets not give the
lawyers anything to latch onto. Howver it would be useful to have a
service of the type cbosgd!ksh suggests (maybe a little cheaper tho).
Also I would love to see more purely commercial things like the Source
where new people can get started.
Re moderation, I think the best way might be to fix news to
support moderated newsgroups. It would have a list of such groups, and
for each group it would know the moderator. Then when an article was
submitted, it would be mailed to the moderator instead of being
distributed to neighbors.
However lets not forget the other ways of reducing the problem:
speeding up the links is one, and improving the user interface so
people are more likely to see existing responses before responding is
another. And then there is that basic tenet of "netiquette": mail
reponses and let the asker moderate his own question.
Sorry for the length of this msg... the program, and a sample
of the output for our site, follow. The program is short so Im
bypassing net.sources. Hopefully it can be easily fixed for other
history file formats.
Andrew Knutsen, ucbvax!hplabs!knutsen or knutsen@sri-unix.arpa
#! /bin/sh
case $# in
1) x=$1;;
*) x=300;;
esac
tail -${x}b $n/history \
| tail +2 \
| head -1 \
| awk '{printf("%s %s %s %s - ", $2, $3, $4, $5)}'
date
tail -${x}b $n/history \
| tail +2 \
| awk '{ for (i=7; i<=NF; i++) print $i }' \
| sed 's,/.*$,,' \
| sort \
| uniq -c \
| sort -rn \
| pr -t -l1 -3 \
Thu Jul 21 02:10:09 - Fri Aug 5 18:28:20 PDT 1983
277 net.unix-wizards 164 net.jokes 159 net.micro
142 net.sf-lovers 141 net.micro.cpm 107 net.flame
90 net.misc 83 net.news 80 net.women
75 net.wanted 69 net.auto 68 net.space
68 net.religion 66 net.ai 65 net.singles
60 net.politics 56 net.general 48 net.sport.baseball
48 net.music 41 net.nlang 41 net.micro.pc
38 net.sources 36 net.movies 35 net.followup
35 net.aviation 34 net.philosophy 32 net.movies.sw
31 net.travel 31 net.audio 28 net.startrek
27 net.lang.c 25 net.rec.bridge 25 msgs
23 net.rec.nude 20 net.works 19 net.pets
18 net.jobs 18 net.games.frp 18 net.chess
18 net.bicycle 17 net.micro.atari 17 net.games.trivia
16 net.games.video 15 net.news.map 15 net.graphics
14 net.usenix 14 net.jokes.d 14 net.cooks
13 net.poems 13 net.ham-radio 12 net.periphs
12 net.news.group 12 net.bugs.uucp 11 net.text
11 net.records 11 net.micro.cbm 10 net.rec.photo
10 net.math 10 net.lang.prolog 10 net.invest
10 net.emacs 9 net.unix 9 net.micro.apple
9 net.lang 9 net.garden 9 net.columbia
9 net.books 8 net.micro.16k 8 net.med
8 net.bugs.4bsd 7 net.tv 7 net.news.newsite
7 net.news.b 7 net.mail 7 net.games.rogue
6 net.video 6 net.games 6 net.comics
5 net.wobegon 5 net.rec.disc 5 net.rec.boat
5 net.dcom 5 net.college 4 net.sport
4 net.lang.pascal 4 net.cycle 3 net.wines
3 net.test 3 net.suicide 3 net.rec.scuba
3 net.micro.68k 3 net.lang.ada 2 net.research
2 net.physics 2 net.lan 2 net.games.pbm
2 net.bugs.2bsd 1 test 1 net.vlsi
1 net.trivia 1 net.taxes 1 net.sport.base
1 net.rec 1 net.railroad 1 net.notes
1 net.news.config 1 net.micro.zx 1 net.lang.st80
1 net.lang.lisp 1 net.lang.forth 1 net.info-terms
1 net.info-micro 1 net.games.triv 1 net.cse
1 net.bugs 1 ba.general