bobvan (11/30/82)
In a recent net.general article, Dave Ihnat wonders how many net news readers there are out there. I am willing to do the count if all the news administrators will take a second a do this: wc /usr/lib/news/users | mail ...!bobvan I'm also interested in the amount of real time spent reading news. If you (news administrators) have output from /etc/sa lying around, please mail me the amount of real time spent in readnews and the number of invocations (first column of output). Be sure and tell me the time period covered by the figures. I'll summarize. Bob Van Valzah (...!decvax!ittvax!tpdcvax!bobvan)
mark (12/01/82)
Alas, counting /usr/lib/news/users is not all that useful, since the answer will be "1" on many systems (it gets created with a default umask owned by the first person to run readnews, so it will probably be unwritable by anybody else). Also, this doesn't uncount people who stop reading news or move to another machine. Anybody got a copy of the 2BSD "fleece" program? If so, could you post it to net.sources? That program runs around looking for a file with a given name in everybody's home directory (driven by /etc/passwd). You could count .newsrc's. It would help to ensure that the .newsrc has been touched in the past month. Mark
vicki (12/01/82)
Counting .netrc files will not be completly right either. Don't forget the NEWSRC enviroment variable for people who share accounts. ucbvax!sdcsvax!vicki philabs!sdcsvax!vicki
whm (12/05/82)
The contents of the /usr/lib/news/users file is far from correct on all our machines here. I've looked at .newsrc files and at the "users" file and lots of people are left out. I've got my own version of readnews (nothing new, just some mods) and my name appears several times. I don't know why "users" is not being updated correctly and I haven't got around to looking into it, but the "users" file is not definitive by any means. (And it is mode 666 here.) If you wanted to do it right, I suppose you'd write a program that would take `fleece .newsrc` as its argument list and perform various types of stats on each file. Let's see, I'd have it: Calculate total number of articles read per user Calculate number of subscribers for each group Calculate groups that have been unsubscribed to. Determine subscription philosophy, i.e. number of users that use "options -n all,!...", vs. "options -n g1,g2,...,gn" What else? Any volunteers? About Larry Kaufman's suggestion that Usenet people wear a distinctive badge at Unicom... I like the idea, but implementation might be a little difficult. It would be interesting to have a uniquely colored "dot" to indicate that one is on Usenet. I was pleased to see that the Unicom registration forms have a "Network Address:" space on them, (but dismayed that it wasn't Address(es)), I guess that indicates that the the badges might include our network address (rather than just in the list of attendees.)
mclure (03/09/83)
#R:tpdcvax:-22400:sri-unix:8200003:000:123 sri-unix!mclure Dec 1 13:23:00 1982 Unfortunately that method does not take into account notesfile users of which there is an ever-increasing number. Stuart