Talk: Propogation, etc

Colin Douthwaite <Col...@equinox.gen.nz> wrote:
>Dan C. Haman (dha...@nmsu.edu) wrote:
>
>> Someone told me that more people could get to the rec groups, or 
>> that the alt group was restricted somehow, I'm not sure which, but 
>> if that's true I would have thought that the rec group would get 
>> more responses and posts and all.  In fact, that is the reason 
>> another group I'm in is changing to a rec group.  Go figure.  

I recently did an analysis of propagation comparing all hierarchies
of Usenet and alt.

Note that Usent is the "big 7" hierarchies: news, comp, sci,
soc, rec, talk, and misc.  alt is the "altnet" that grew of its
own accord because a lot of sites didn't want to carry 
certain kinds of groups.  The big 7 are, technically, "worldwide",
although no site is required to carry any group; alt is pretty
random.

The news.* hierarchy has the best propagation, overall, mainly
because it includes the "administrative" groups like news.groups.
About 70% of sites, on average, carry groups in news.

The six other Usenet hierarchies have average propagation in
the 50-65% range.

Whil many alt groups are very popular and found all over the place,
the complete anarchy represented there (technically, anyone can
"create" a group at whim) has led to much less certain propagation
of any new alt group.  Many new alt groups have very low 
propagation, no matter how apparent the popularity of the subject.
While all of the big commercial online services (netcom, AOL,
etc.) tend to create any alt group they get a control message
for, beyond that it's much less certain ground, and without
a good rationale an alt group won't get created when the sysadmin
finally gets around to looking at it.

>In general the readership statistics show that mainstream newsgroups 
>( The Big 7 - which includes "rec" groups ) do have higher 
>propagation than Alt groups but this conclusion is only very general 
>and the reality is that there is wide variation in propagation 
>levels from group to group. It therefore does NOT follow that change 
>from an Alt to Rec ( or any other mainstream hierarchy ) will 
>automatically ensure either higher propagation or higher readership.  

It won't ensure it, but the chances are Very Good that it will.
While there are quit a number of sites who carry no alt at all,
those who cut out Usenet hierarchies are less common; for instance,
alt.games.doom is gone, so I can't be sure, but it looks like
agd.* groups were on about 35% of sites; but the relatively new
REC.games.doom.* hierarchy is on around 45%.

Followups to news.groups & alt.config.

-- 
 Daniel A. Hartung             |  Support the new Arts/Humanities hierarchy!
 dha...@mcs.com              |  "I believe we can fly
 dha...@chinet.chinet.com    |                  on the wings that we create"
 http//:www.mcs.net/~dhartung/ |        -- Melissa Etheridge

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