Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Upgrading Usenet (was Re: Who pays the bill?)
Message-ID: <1990Aug9.152043.29100@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug1.230858.3264@iwarp.intel.com> <EMV.90Aug1202214@urania.math.lsa.umic <1990Aug02.203405.40@looking.on.ca> <29103@becker.UUCP> <1990Aug04.171540.29439@looking.on.ca> <26BCDA30.21C@intercon.com> <1990Aug7.180710.3872@zoo.toronto.edu> <ar37h5.c50@wang.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 90 15:20:43 GMT

In article <ar37h5.c50@wang.com> fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) writes:
>This is probably a serious underestimate...
>... mail-to-news gateways ...
>...[avoidance of] super-jumbo message IDs...
>... NNTP posting agents ...

Yes, it's very difficult to assess these things.  However, message-ID
analysis has the enormous virtue that it's quite cheap, unlike the fairly
drastic step of sending out a "version" control message.  Message-IDs only
give us a sample of the net, rather than a complete census, but it's
something we can afford to do regularly for trend tracking.  If we're
feeling masochistic some time, we may try a "version" message to try to
measure the sampling error. :-)

It's always going to be difficult to figure out what's running at sites
whose news traffic is gatewayed through from other software -- be it mail
or NNTP -- that generates its own message-IDs.  The super-jumbo-ID problem
will be reduced somewhat when we start using a more compact ID format (it's
coming), although we do plan to continue making the IDs distinct enough
for this sort of analysis.
-- 
It is not possible to both understand  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and appreciate Intel CPUs. -D.Wolfskill|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
