• Request Running Usage Report

    From Jason Evans@21:1/5 to All on Fri Jan 15 15:32:21 2021
    Hi all,

    As a part of the Big-8 board, we are looking at doing another audit of
    unused newsgroups in the big-8 hierarchies. I would like to know if
    anyone would volunteer to run a report of newsgroups that have had
    traffic since your server has been up. My own news server only has about
    60 days worth of history. I would rather get a list of groups with a year
    or more of history.

    The report is a simple bash script found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tgeek77/Usenet_Scripts/main/
    Big-8_Report.sh

    I will take the findings from here and subtract those newsgroups from the canonical list from isc.org. Any unmoderated groups with little or no
    traffic will be researched as possible candidates for deletion. Any
    moderated groups with no traffic will have their last known moderators contacted and will be handled separately.

    Thanks for your help! Feel free to reply with any questions or email me
    with the report results.

    JE

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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Jason Evans on Fri Jan 15 16:07:56 2021
    Jason Evans <jsevans@mailfence.com> wrote:

    As a part of the Big-8 board, we are looking at doing another audit of
    unused newsgroups in the big-8 hierarchies. I would like to know if
    anyone would volunteer to run a report of newsgroups that have had
    traffic since your server has been up. My own news server only has about
    60 days worth of history. I would rather get a list of groups with a year
    or more of history.

    The report is a simple bash script found here: >https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tgeek77/Usenet_Scripts/main/ >Big-8_Report.sh

    I will take the findings from here and subtract those newsgroups from the >canonical list from isc.org. Any unmoderated groups with little or no
    traffic will be researched as possible candidates for deletion. Any
    moderated groups with no traffic will have their last known moderators >contacted and will be handled separately.

    Thanks for your help! Feel free to reply with any questions or email me
    with the report results.

    Oh dear gawd don't start this crap again. It's outrageous that
    you would post this in news.admin.peering and not news.groups.

    It accomplishes nothing. There are groups that are very low traffic
    because no one posts into unless there's a specific reason to post. There are groups that no one will ever post into again. You CANNOT tell the
    difference with this report.

    Furthermore, there are groups that appear to have traffic, but it's just
    idiots crossposting or some cron job reposting articles from the Web to
    Usenet. That's not Usenet being used for discussion. Such groups
    are entirely useless.

    rmgrouping doesn't actually make newsgroups go away. Not every News administrator would honor your checkgroups, especially if he has allows
    long expirations and has articles going back years, or decades.

    Recognizing a shorter list of newsgroups is not a worthwhile goal. It doesn't force traffic into existing groups and it could harm the possibility of a
    group being used in future if there's a reason to post to it.

    There are no inodes to be saved any longer.

    I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely outrageous it is to post
    something like this in the peering newsgroup and not news.groups.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Neodome Admin@21:1/5 to Jason Evans on Fri Jan 22 00:47:02 2021
    Jason Evans <jsevans@mailfence.com> wrote:

    Any unmoderated groups with little or no
    traffic will be researched as possible candidates for deletion.

    The only control messages my server is going to execute automatically are newgroup messages for alt.* and free.* hierarchies. I deleted all other
    entries from control.ctl when I started the server back in 2016. Just
    saying.

    --
    Neodome

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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)