Re: Where to find accurate number of Usenet Servers?

Hi,

Am 10.10.2021 um 18:47 schrieb Grant Taylor:
> On 10/10/21 7:02 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>> If the pope shits in the woods and there is no one around to smell it, 
>> does it still have an odor?
> 
> Almost certainly.  The pope's digestive system isn't going to do 
> anything differently based on if there are people around or not.
> 
>> 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's contrary to my understanding.
> 
> My understanding is that Top1000 is about the number / volume of 
> articles, and decidedly not about speed.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I haven't seen anything about stats to Top1000 being about /time/.
> 
> There's no time tracking as messages flow through Usenet servers like 
> there are in email Received: headers.  Even if there were, you have the 
> inconsistency of clocks to content with.
> 
> Thankfully, the number of messages that pass through a given server is 
> independent of time.

I guess time is an implicit factor. An article is accepted by a given 
server from the first peer it offers it, from all other peers it is 
refused. That system that won the race ends up in the path header, all 
others do not. I see a lot more articles from a peer in the same 
datacenter then from a peer on the other side of the planet.

Other factors are how well connected a system is (number of peers), and 
how many articles are posted on that server, because that will make the 
system show up in more path headers.

Cheers
Martin