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