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From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: Fixing the unbroken
Message-ID: <57577@looking.on.ca>
Date: 6 Dec 89 17:53:23 GMT
References: <56804@looking.on.ca> <11984@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 29
Class: discussion

In article <11984@cbnews.ATT.COM> wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker,00440,cb,1D211,6148604019) writes:
>>The question
>>that the guidelines try to answer, don't forget, is, "what groups by
>>default should go to all machines."
>
>It seems to me that, rather, the guidelines are to demonstrate that
>there is sufficient interest in the group to verify that sites you
>feed are likely to have interested readers, and enough of them to warrant 
>your carrying of the group.

So what you're saying is that rather than measure how many interested
readers there *actually are*, we should try to measure if the group is
"likely to have interested readers," and that we should do this by
checking if 150 people (typical number) will send email supporting the
group?

Seems to me that creating the group in a limited area and checking
the real interest there is 100 times better than trying to find out if
interest is likely through a complex and noisy procedure.

To answer another question -- a good metric would take some account
of net topology.  For example, if you have a reader downstream that
you are willing to feed, that counts as having a reader on your site.

To calculate this, all we have to do is flow the readership data
up backwards through the flow graph, or rather the directed subset
of that graph.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473