Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: USENET READERSHIP SUMMARY REPORT FOR DEC 89
Summary: a few nits
Message-ID: <15051@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Date: 1 Jan 90 22:35:12 GMT
References: <337@apostrophe.dec.com>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Lines: 36

In article <337@apostrophe.dec.com> reid@decwrl.dec.com (Brian Reid) writes:
>USENET READERSHIP SUMMARY REPORT for Dec 89

Problem #1: These articles are crossposted to three news.* groups (lists,
misc and admin) but do not carry a Followup-To: field.  This is a frequently
stressed guideline: if you crosspost, pick one group for followups.  It's
hard to police the guideline with every individual user's postings of
course, but it should be *easy* to fix it on these standardized monthly
things, and it would set a good example.

>This is the first article in a monthly posting series from the Network
             *****
>Measurement Project at the DEC Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto,
>California. 

I see this every month - what does it mean.  The delivery order of Brian's
arbitron batch is frequently scrambled by the time it arrives at readers'
sites.  "1 of 5" in the title would be better, if the order is important
at all.

>Duplicated data for uunet

Does this mean what I think it means?  If UUNET's data is counted twice,
the stats are going to be seriously skewed because UUNET is a major hub.
If it means that UUNET reported twice or more during the reporting period,
and that only one of the reports was used for this summary, then the next
question is, did UUNET report the next interval early -- so that it will
be skipped in January, or was skipped in November -- or does it report
extra times EVERY period?

No big flame intended, but I'd like to see these things kept meaningful,
if only to discourage the copycat "Preposition Histograms For Usenet"
postings from proliferating.
-- 
"UNIX should be used          ::   Tom Neff <tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET> or
 as an adjective." -- AT&T   ::    ...uunet!bfmny0!tneff (UUCP only)