Xref: utzoo alt.config:80 news.config:488
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!reid
From: reid@decwrl.dec.com (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: alt.config,news.config
Subject: Re: The size of the 'alt' subnet
Message-ID: <301@bacchus.DEC.COM>
Date: 26 Feb 88 19:27:25 GMT
References: <5077@swan.ulowell.edu> <1939@epimass.EPI.COM> <5098@swan.ulowell.edu>
Reply-To: reid@decwrl.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Organization: DEC Western Research
Lines: 10

Did you do a control-group test also? Send out a sendsys to the whole network
(not just the alt subpart) to see what you got back there? I don't believe
you have actually learned anything at all about the relative sizes of the alt
subnet and the complete net until you do that part of the experiment. In the
past when I have send out sendsys requests, I have gotten replies from less
than 5%-10% of the sites that I thought should be responding.

Once you have both the "whole network" and the "alt subnet" counts, then you
can take their ratio to get an estimate of how much of the net gets alt
groups.