Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: C News milestone
Message-ID: <1990Nov13.215847.23684@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 90 21:58:47 GMT

As I believe I've mentioned before, we regularly run statistics on usage
of different news systems by analyzing our history file.  The major news
systems generate message-IDs of distinctive forms, so it's not hard to
get an idea of how many people are running which system.  This counting
approach has flaws -- in particular, it obviously tends to miss sites
that seldom post anything to network-wide newsgroups -- but it has the
enormous advantage that it's a quick, cheap, local operation, so we can
do it weekly for keeping running track of the situation.

The general patterns in recent times have been fairly consistent.  We
categorize news systems into B, C, and ?, the last being message-IDs
which fit no known format.  ? has been growing rapidly, probably as a
result of more and more inter-network gatewaying; there is no single
dominant pattern among the ? message-IDs, but a lot of them are clearly
the results of gatewaying.  B has been declining very slowly.  And C
has been growing steadily, with definite signs that the growth is
accelerating.

Anyway, the current milestone is that last weekend (while I was away at
Windycon, which is why you're just hearing about it now), C passed 1000.
Undoubtedly the C News site count actually hit four digits quite some
time ago, since we know of major C News users who seldom post anything to
the outside world, but it's definite now.
-- 
"I don't *want* to be normal!"         | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
"Not to worry."                        |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
