Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!anise.acc.com!pst
From: pst@anise.acc.com (Paul Traina)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Validity of USENET news statistics
Message-ID: <1989Sep22.205741.29056@anise.acc.com>
Date: 22 Sep 89 20:57:41 GMT
References: <17735@looking.on.ca> <1989Sep20.060201.4473@rpi.edu> <1989Sep22.061846.4560@rpi.edu>
Organization: Advanced Computer Communications, Santa Barbara, California
Lines: 15

NNTP server sites are becoming more typical.  At the Baltimore USENIX NNTP
and News BOF's I suggested that we add a non-secure "USER" command which
would be used just for statistics gathering purposes.  If a client (such as rn)
were modified to send out "USER user@host.domain" upon connection to the
server,  we could gather enough statistics to build arbitron or other reports.

Since this has come up again and again,  I'll hack in the changes to nntpd
and rn tonight.  I'll publish the changes and someone (or myself) can come
up with some awk scripts to build arbitron reports.  If we like it,  let's
make it a formal hack.

Paul
-- 
The difference between this school and a cactus plant is that the
cactus has the pricks on the outside.