P-List traffic for last July

Tim Strzechowski dedalus204 at comcast.net
Mon Nov 6 11:05:29 CST 2006


I'm not sure where Toby is going with this.  Having had several offlist conversations with him and having worked with him during the VL group read a coupla years back, I would like to think he's not being malicious here.  Maybe, as he himself admits, it's a certain crankiness that has led to this statistical breakdown.  But I also hear an accusatory tone in all this as well.

In Toby's initial post, part of the impetus for examining the statistics was not only the amount of posting done, but the fact that so much of it was (he felt) "mostly blather and unreadable."  I think these statistics of frequency should also address on-topic/off-topic ratio if it's to "mean" anything.  Some topics generate lively debate, annotations, and literary discourse; others, little more than bitching and flaming. Some folks here post frequently and most of it is essential to the discussion; some people post frequently and it's nothing more than NP-related or flame nonsense.

I am not a statistician, so I leave the grunt work to those who can do it justice.  But these stats are pretty meaningless without examining their relevance to P-related discussion threads.

Tim (52 in July) S.

Post #2
>
> Someone requested I look at the P-List traffic in July, before the ATD 
> announcement. 
> 
> Here it is: 
> 
> Total messages in July 2006: 1311 (over 42 a day) 
> Total number of people posting to the list: 96 
> Total number of those posting once a week or less: 60 
> Total number posting once a day or less: 84 
> [...]

Post #1:
> 
> I am not a fan of high traffic email lists. Most of the time when the 
> message traffic exceeds 30 messages a day it's mostly blather and 
> unreadable. Is it just my approaching old age crankiness, or has the 
> p-list gotten out of hand? Here's an analysis of message traffic in 
> October: 
> 
> Total messages: 1878 (over 60 a day) 
> 
> Total number of people posting to the list: 102 
> Total number of those posting once a week or less: 55 
> Total number posting less than once a day: 87 
> 
[...]
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