From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c80861c7209231ac X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 10eb76,c80861c7209231ac X-Google-Attributes: gid10eb76,public X-Google-Thread: 114917,c80861c7209231ac X-Google-Attributes: gid114917,public From: lwv26@cas.org (Larry W. Virden) Subject: Re: Number of postings to comp.lang.* newsgroups. Date: 1996/12/04 Message-ID: <5845jd$lfu@srv13s4.cas.org>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 202316369 references: <56ti81$e0u@pea.csc.calpoly.edu> <32935F3C.17F8@sn.no> <57uku7$7je@srv13s4.cas.org> <5823dg$l6r@north.pacific.net> content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII organization: Nedriv Software and Shoe Shiners, Uninc. mime-version: 1.0 reply-to: lvirden@cas.org newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl,comp.lang.asm.x86,comp.lang.ada originator: lwv26@cas.org (Larry W. Virden) x-newsposter: Pnews 4.0-test47 (1 Dec 96) Date: 1996-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: According to : :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 <*> 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.