Re: Number of postings to comp.lang.* newsgroups.

[lwv26@cas.org (Larry W. Virden)]

According to  <ccrayne@pacific.net>:
:In <57uku7$7je@srv13s4.cas.org>, lwv26@cas.org (Larry W. Virden) writes:
:#Here's another interesting note - the msg being quoted here happens to be
:#message 51,660 on my system; which means the number of posts listed are
:#off by almost 50% !
:
:Here's another interesting note - the msg being quoted here happens to be
:message 26,102 on my system; which means the number of posts has
:nothing whatsoever to do with the message number provided by my ISP.

Hopefully this is blindingly obvious to folk - unless your ISP has been
around for 3 years, of course s/he will not have the articles posted from
the beginning.

Besides this difference, there are outages, cancelled articles which may
make it to some sites and not others, etc.

However, in _most_ implementations, the article number of an article
reflects a sequentially increasing number based on arrival times.

I suspect that by looking at the active file from uunet (a long time
usenet news provider, who definitely was around back at the beginning of
a majority of newsgroups, and whose connectivity is pretty high, thus
reflecting a lot of postings which never make it a lot farther due to
cancellations...) we can get pretty close to the number of articles.
For the above 3 newsgroups, uunet reports, as of early this morning:
comp.lang.ada: 0000054555
comp.lang.asm.x86: 0000035059
comp.lang.tcl: 0000059159
-- 
:s Larry W. Virden                 INET: lvirden@cas.org
:s <URL:http://www.teraform.com/%7Elvirden/> <*> O- "We are all Kosh."
:s Unless explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting should
:s be construed as representing my employer's opinions.