Xref: utzoo news.admin:14647 news.software.b:7960 comp.groupware:574 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!uunet!airs!ian From: ian@airs.com (Ian Lance Taylor) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b,comp.groupware Subject: Re: news.feedback? (Was: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: <1790@airs.com> Date: 26 May 91 01:34:25 GMT References: <282FD655.3D2A@tct.com> <5ukZ24w164w@mantis.co.uk> <1991May18.192836.137@micrognosis.co.uk> <1991May19.102741.24411@wimsey.bc.ca> <1991May21.155936.9037@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991May24.162137.5615@gorm.ruc.dk> Sender: news@airs.com Followup-To: news.admin Lines: 28 david@gorm.ruc.dk (David Stodolsky) writes: >[Plan for using news.feedback to see whether an article is propagated] >At the completion of the news reading session the software posts the records >showing actions and reactions to articles encountered in news.feedback. >These posts would be in a highly compressed form, not intended for human >consumption directly. This is a little ambiguous. Do you mean to post reactions to EVERY article in EVERY newsgroup to news.feedback, or do you mean to post reactions to articles in news.feedback to news.feedback (somehow avoiding the effect of positive, ah, feedback)? The former seems rather drastically unworkable. The latter, while interesting, isn't that much different from posting to misc.test (assuming, as I have seen claimed, that people actually do have auto-reply daemons set up for misc.test; I don't have such a setup at AIRS). This approach still wouldn't tell you how well your article was propagated, unless the propagation was really dismal or unless you have a really good grasp of what nodes are on Usenet. You could check for specific machines, but how could you tell whether, say, 10% of the machines were not represented? -- Ian Taylor ian@airs.com uunet!airs!ian First person to identify this quote wins a free e-mail message: ``Nobody believed him, so out of politeness to his listeners he pretended to be joking.''