Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!know!theep!rk From: rk@theep.boston.ma.us (Robert A. Kukura) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: C News milestone Message-ID: Date: 14 Nov 90 14:04:44 GMT References: <1990Nov13.215847.23684@zoo.toronto.edu> Sender: rk@theep.boston.ma.us (Robert A. Kukura) Organization: Theeptronics Lines: 43 In-Reply-To: henry@zoo.toronto.edu's message of 13 Nov 90 21:58:47 GMT In article <1990Nov13.215847.23684@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: As I believe I've mentioned before, we regularly run statistics on usage of different news systems by analyzing our history file. The major news systems generate message-IDs of distinctive forms, so it's not hard to get an idea of how many people are running which system. This counting approach has flaws -- in particular, it obviously tends to miss sites that seldom post anything to network-wide newsgroups -- but it has the enormous advantage that it's a quick, cheap, local operation, so we can do it weekly for keeping running track of the situation. The general patterns in recent times have been fairly consistent. We categorize news systems into B, C, and ?, the last being message-IDs which fit no known format. ? has been growing rapidly, probably as a result of more and more inter-network gatewaying; there is no single dominant pattern among the ? message-IDs, but a lot of them are clearly the results of gatewaying. B has been declining very slowly. And C has been growing steadily, with definite signs that the growth is accelerating. For one, you are probably missing sites where the emacs gnus newsreader is used because it generates its own ids of the form: Message-ID: I don't know if any other newsreaders/posters generate their own message ids. Anyway, the current milestone is that last weekend (while I was away at Windycon, which is why you're just hearing about it now), C passed 1000. Undoubtedly the C News site count actually hit four digits quite some time ago, since we know of major C News users who seldom post anything to the outside world, but it's definite now. Congratulations. -- "I don't *want* to be normal!" | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology "Not to worry." | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry -- -Bob Kukura internet: rk@theep.boston.ma.us uucp: spdcc!theep!rk