Re: Where to find accurate number of Usenet Servers?

Grant Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:

>> But if they have any outbound servers they feed articles to, eventually
>> their path will be detected and then counted.
> 
> Maybe.  Maybe not.

It's more maybe than maybe not.

Like I pointed out, those entries for fidonet.org.ru in the top1000 list, I
really doubt all of them (305?) are using or sending reports to
anthologeek.net, those probably are single messages sent to fidonet and
somewhere down the line is ending up being counted as a server.

> Does a server need to /send/ articles /to/ Usenet to participate in 
> Usenet?  Is it not sufficient to /receive/ articles /from/ Usenet and 
> have users read said articles?  }:-)

I dunno.

If the pope shits in the woods and there is no one around to smell it, does
it still have an odor?

That top1000 site, when we first started to feed our stats into it, I was
under the impression it was for speed of articles posted. So if one system
got an article posted from somewhere in the world in 3 seconds and another
system in 10 seconds, the first system got a higher rank.

That made sense back in the days UUCP was still common (or even bnews or
cnews) because some articles could take hours/days/weeks to show up. 

Now with most systems on nntp, not really sure what the point is measuring
all that anymore.

I remember a while back (late 90's, early 2000's?) there was one system that
constantly was in the top 5 if not in the #1 position and they were running
a pc using Windows something. When asked how they did it, the answer was
fairly simple, they had 100's of feeds and a shitload of ram.

So that top1000 site, besides being handy to see who is left, doesn't seem
to have any real world use anymore.

-bruce
[email protected]