Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale
From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Validity of USENET news statistics
	(was: Report Card on the success of the group creation guidelines)
Summary: just some information, not debate
Message-ID: <1989Sep22.061846.4560@rpi.edu>
Date: 22 Sep 89 06:18:46 GMT
References: <17735@looking.on.ca> <1989Sep20.060201.4473@rpi.edu>
	<45814@bbn.COM> <4402@ncar.ucar.edu> <18401@looking.on.ca>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 38
In-Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca's message of 21 Sep 89 01:06:29 GMT

In <18401@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
Brad> Greg thinks no, because at his site they have an NNTP server
Brad> where nobody reads news and lots of clients which are never
Brad> counted in arbitron surveys.  Is this typical?  I also know
Brad> sites which have a server where lots of people read news on the
Brad> server, and others read on the clients.  Which is more common?

Well, to provide at least one more data point in this, we are set up
much like NCAR.  Only usenet@rpi.edu has a .newsrc that has been
touched at all recently and then only for testing things.  Only one
other person who can log into the server has a .newsrc there, which
hasn't been touched since mid-Feb.  Reading is done via both NNTP and
NFS, and, like Greg, I can't login to every host which uses rpi.edu
for USENET service.  rpi.edu would provide some pretty non-representative
statistics for Rensselaer.

Brad> But I fail to see why this is a problem.  Are many arbitron
Brad> reports sent in for servers with no readers?  Why would anybody
Brad> bother so send in such a report?  Arbitron senders, let me know?

We don't send it, as much as I wish I could collect the data.  I might
begin working soon on a way to provide some useful data from out nntpd
syslogging, but it seems pretty inaccurate.  For one thing, different
uses can't really be told apart and for another there is the NFS end.
I think most of the information provided via syslog is only really
useful locally.

Another source of USENET statistics, inpaths, is much more easy to
deal with because it just has to run on the server.  Now presumably
some of that data could be corrupted if it were to run on machines
which used that server, but in general it has a lot less of the
problems which arbitron has.  Then again, they are measuring
completely different things.  Perhaps it is time to find another
interesting aspect of the net to measure, too.

Dave
--
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