From: kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu (Dr Nancy's Sweetie)
Subject: Netnews Statistics
Organization: Glassboro State College (The Hour Is Growing Late)
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 17:17:02 GMT


Marci Hendrix asks:

> Does that mean we are hooked up to people that aren't listed if we send a
> listserve request to review the members?

Yes.  Christia is gated to the Usenet group "bit.listserv.christia", where it
is distributed to machines all around the world.  Everyone with an account on
one of these machines has access to all Christia traffic.


> Out of curiosity, how many more people than who's listed might be receiving
> our list.

There is a Usenet group called "news.lists" where interesting statistics are
sent.  Over the last two weeks, uunet.uu.net (a computer that is hooked into
everything) reported this amount of traffic:

   242708 articles, totaling 471.633755 Mbytes (584.197365 including headers),
   were submitted from 20413 different Usenet sites by 54750 different
   users to 3628 different newsgroups for an average of 33.688125 Mbytes
   (41.728383 including headers) per day.

At a guess, for everybody who posts an article 10 people read without posting;
that would put the total number of Usenet readers at about a half-million.  Of
course, many of them would not be at all interested in religious topics.  I'd
guesstimate about 10,000 people read "bit.listserv.christia" on a regular
basis.  There is another list of "estimated readership", but we don't have any
on gboro right now; if specific data about Christia comes in, I'll send it
along.


As it happens, one of us made another list, "Top 25 News Submitters by User by
number of articles for the last 2 weeks".  Here's the particulars:

         No. of       % of
Rank Articles KBytes Total   User

  15   145     124.0  0.0%   kste@purccvm.BITNET  (Kerry Stephenson)
			      58% bit.listserv.christia
			      41% bit.listserv.politics

So Miss Stephenson has sent out 145 articles in two weeks, making her the
15th most prolific person on Usenet.  The articles totalled 124 kbytes of
text, making them a vanishingly small percentage of the total traffic.  (By
the numbers listed above, the average post is 1900 characters, whereas hers
average under 900 characters.)  She puts out about 10 posts per day, but
we get only 6 of them on Christia -- the other 4 go to Politics.  (The
numbers do not add up to 100%; either she participates on other lists as
well, or there is roundoff error.)

 [ And there are people who think George Orwell was wrong. ]


Whether Mr Klepzig or Ms McBurney want to terminate the Usenet distribution of
Christia is up to them, of course.  However, we do get lots of neat statistics
from the Usenet software.  8-)

Personally, I read Christia _only_ through netnews, because the netnews
software permits me to filter posts much more quickly.  (If you hit the `k'
key, all posts with the same subject line are automatically deleted.  This
allows one to skip discussions one is not interested in.  Similarly, one can
create a KILL file to delete all posts from a particular person, or all posts
with certain keywords in them (eg, "Politics").)  If Christia were reduced
only to a mailing list I'd have to write some new software to enable me to
keep up with the traffic, or modify the netnews software to handle a mailbox,
or maybe set up MH to do some automatic filtering on incoming posts.

I'll think of something, don't worry.  8-)


Darren F Provine / kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu
" > One basic notion underlying Usenet is that it is a cooperative.

  Having been on USENET for going on ten years, I disagree with this.
  The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame." -- Chuq Von Rospach
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU