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Grex > Coop8 > #36: Conference participation files on Grex | |
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steve
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Conference participation files on Grex
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Mar 10 18:54 UTC 1996 |
Someone asked about the size of the various conferences on Grex.
Here is a look at participation as of the last time the locate
database was updated (probably last friday or saturday).
There are 15,811 conference files total. 5,342 are from previous
agoras, making 10,469. If you subtract a couple hundred for other
previous conferences, we have roughly 10,000 conference participation
files spread out over 5,598 accounts, making for half the accounts
on Grex having one or more .cf files.
So, here is the list.
3118 .agora15.cf [previous conference]
2912 .agora16.cf
1040 .agora14.cf [previous conference]
715 .agora13.cf [previous conference]
469 .agora12.cf [previous conference]
401 .sexuality.cf
352 .cflirt.cf
319 .info.cf
234 .music.cf
229 .inet.cf
209 .coop7.cf [previous conference]
190 .poetry.cf
181 .class1.cf
156 .test.cf
152 .puzzle.cf
148 .coop6.cf
139 .scifi2.cf
129 .enigma.cf
126 .vomit.cf
125 .writing.cf
122 .smiley.cf
119 .entertainment.cf
112 .jelly.cf
110 .synth.cf
106 .oathbound.cf
105 .books1.cf
103 .games.cf
100 .femme.cf
99 .reality.cf
98 .hardware.cf
97 .scruples.cf
96 .lang1.cf
94 .micros.cf
92 .world2.cf
89 .kitchen2.cf
88 .aaypsi.cf
87 .cyberp.cf
86 .fun.cf
85 .rpg1.cf
83 .homme.cf
82 .mud.cf
81 .pseudo.cf
81 .melvin.cf
81 .drfuz.cf
79 .ing.cf
78 .zone.cf
77 .sports2.cf
73 .inferno.cf
72 .inbetween2.cf
71 .cars1.cf
70 .coop8.cf
67 .radio.cf
64 .history.cf
63 .grexnews.cf
60 .rialto.cf
60 .laundry.cf
60 .hippie.cf
58 .smalls.cf
58 .helpers.cf
57 .nature.cf
57 .consumer.cf
55 .zen.cf
55 .travel.cf
55 .rp3.cf
55 .paradox.cf
51 .accordions.cf
50 .xgen.cf
48 .photo.cf
47 .grexohio.cf
46 .fantasy1.cf
41 .tutoring.cf
40 .finance.cf
40 .comics.cf
39 .politics.cf
38 .environ.cf
34 .publicity.cf
34 .plants.cf
29 .health.cf
26 .archive.cf
23 .staff.cf
22 .pets.cf
21 .garage.cf
21 .disabilities.cf
21 .commnets.cf
20 .ascii.cf
20 .amiga1.cf
19 .win1.cf
15 .safety.cf
14 .newsletter.cf
13 .info2.cf
11 .gen1.cf
10 .sympathy.cf
10 .monthly.cf
7 .tabloid.cf
6 .mrbl.cf
5 .share1.cf
2 .rp2.cf [previous conference]
2 .roleplay.cf
2 .only1.cf
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| 113 responses total. |
jared
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response 1 of 113:
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Mar 10 20:54 UTC 1996 |
so you do a find . -atime +90 -exec rm {} \;
actually, mtime.
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steve
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response 2 of 113:
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Mar 10 21:07 UTC 1996 |
Sure, but that isn't quite the point. I'm wondering what the
numbers mean: are failing in our providing conferencing to
people, or what? How, and should we strive to increase conference
participation? I think we should, but don't have a good idea
yet on how to do that.
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mta
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response 3 of 113:
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Mar 10 21:21 UTC 1996 |
Fo Coop specifically, I think a brief mention in the MOTD once in a while
would be good. It's certainly appropriate to let people know in MOTD how to
have a voic in running GREX.
Other conferences? Dunno, except that I always emphasize them in my fliers
and I encourage others to do the same.
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kerouac
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response 4 of 113:
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Mar 10 21:40 UTC 1996 |
curious...I wonder why agora usage has jumped so dramatically...
agora12 which would have been winter of a year ago had only 469 users
and the current version has 3,118?! This is quite odd since winter
agora a year ago had like 190-200 messages, whereas the current version
will likely max out at 120-125. So winter96 agora has eight times as
many people reading it and yet 80 fewer messages?
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popcorn
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response 5 of 113:
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Mar 10 21:49 UTC 1996 |
Wow, some real surprises there. I would've thought kitchen would have been
much higher, and cflirt much lower, for example. Info is much higher than
I'd've expected, too.
Richard -- many of the people who participated in previous agoras have been
reaped by now, which changes the statistics for current users who still have
an old agora participation file hanging around.
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steve
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response 6 of 113:
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Mar 10 22:12 UTC 1996 |
Valerie is right; when I did a check like this about a year ago,
agora12 participation files were the most common.
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kerouac
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response 7 of 113:
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Mar 10 22:22 UTC 1996 |
#5...oh, thanks that would explain it. I think this is proof that the
confs arent being publicized enough.
Also there seem to be a lot of dead confs. Just in checking a few, a couple
like safety, havent had a new entry in them since 1994, and others like
hippie and zen have gone almost a year without any new entries. Does
cfadmin have a policy defining when a conf is dead and should be purged?
The roleplay conf only has two current users left and neither of them
probably use it anymore. There are other confs on this list I saw that
I tried briefly and they dont seem to have fw's anymore. One conf,
sympathy, has no messages at all and basically looks like it wasnt even
started (Sidhe is the fw and he doesnt seem to be around anymore since
he didnt get elected to the board)
Also, clearly there are some confs that would be more effective if
combined. Like Grexnews and Publicity, neither one of which is used
much, could both be folded along with the Newsletter conf into one
larger conf, called something like Grexpublic. The zen conf could be
foldedc into Synthesis. Cleaning up some of these dead weight confs
would be a first step towards finding a better method of conference
presentation to new users.
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robh
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response 8 of 113:
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Mar 10 22:34 UTC 1996 |
Re 5 - You thought cflirt would be lower? I'm shocked that
it's all the way back in third place. >8)
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kerouac
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response 9 of 113:
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Mar 11 00:17 UTC 1996 |
This goes back to a discussion held a few months back about how to
get more newbies to try confs other than agora. I still think newuser
could be modified to get newbies to identify their conferencing
interests there so default .cf files could be set up automatically
on their first login for more confs than just agora. If a newbie
creating a login says religion is a confing interest, he could have
synthesis automatically put into his .cf file and .etc
Has there been any more input into the creating of an intro conf that
newbies could be pointed to instead of agora? I'm starting to think
newbies should be pointed here to coop instead of agora if there is no
intro conf. This would seem more logical.
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steve
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response 10 of 113:
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Mar 11 01:59 UTC 1996 |
technically, it isn't all that hard. Look at the interests given
when newuser was run, and do a match on any number of strings that
coorespond to the various conferences here. Each FW could supply a
list of them; any strings that are duplicates between two different
conferences could be resolved by putting both conferences in the
new persons .cflist.
the biggest question is, do we want to do this?
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brighn
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response 11 of 113:
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Mar 11 02:02 UTC 1996 |
clift (After Dark) ranges from being extremely active (in the range of
30 - 40 new posts a day) to deathly slow, depending on whether I've
managed to tick everyone off or not... bleh. =}
(so saith the moody main FW)
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popcorn
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response 12 of 113:
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Mar 11 04:53 UTC 1996 |
Re 8: I haven't seen any mention of the cflirt conference anyplace on the
system. No advertising, no mentions of discussions there, nothing. For a
conference that popular, it's very self-contained.
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popcorn
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response 13 of 113:
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Mar 11 06:12 UTC 1996 |
Aha! If you type "join sex" you end up in the cflirt conference.
That explains it right there....
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rcurl
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response 14 of 113:
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Mar 11 06:26 UTC 1996 |
I think the situation is a lot bleaker than even #0 suggests. In the cfs
that I read the average *participation* on a regular basis is maybe 10% of
those having participation files. This is not surprising as many users
might join a cf and read it for only a while. Only if one has a .cflist
does one automatically watch cf activity. It would be interesting to
expand the data in #0 into the coordinate of how many participated in the
last week, the last month, and the last year (or some other parameters
that disclose active use rather than just at least one use).
It is also evident from the data that these conferences are not drawing
very many from the *potential* interest in the local dialin area, much
less from the internet. How many people (that are online) might be
interested in discussing books, for example? A lot more than 105.
However, there is some good news. The fact that there have been no
responses in .safety since 1994 just proves how safe we all are, right?
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gregc
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response 15 of 113:
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Mar 11 07:30 UTC 1996 |
There's no point in deleting a little used conference. The /bbs partition
was at 62megs when we moved to the Sun-3 over 2 years ago. Recently
it was cleaned up when space got tight, but it had only grow to 95megs
in a span of 25 months. That's only about 16meg per year. The Sun-4 has
space for 200meg /bbs, so we really don't need to delete a conference even
if only a handful of people use it.
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brighn
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response 16 of 113:
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Mar 11 09:02 UTC 1996 |
Word of mouth is the best sort of advertising, too, Valerie.
Although I'm inclined to agree with you. There are only about
a dozen "regulars" in cflirt... i can see 14-year-old boys
typing "j sex" to see what would happen. That also explains
Human Sexuality being so high on the list, when it's all but
dead right now.
As far as adverts, hmmm... all of the Human Sexuality FWs and
at leeast 2/3 of the After Dark FWs don't even go into
Agora. Maybe I should go do some advertising. 8^)
(Hsex FWs: Selena, Brighn; Cflirt FWs: Brighn, Hross, Selena)
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davel
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response 17 of 113:
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Mar 11 12:38 UTC 1996 |
STeve, it might be more interesting to build your list with some kind of
aging, so that you only count participation files newer than a month (or two,
or whatever). This would reduce it to those participating actively enough
to be somewhat currently reading a conference.
You might also build something to look through people's .cflists. This would
exclude those who don't know how to use .cflists (or prefer not to do so),
& might require root or at least cfadm access to run fully, but it would be
another way of providing some sense of what's actively being read as opposed
to what users have looked at once some time in the past.
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steve
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response 18 of 113:
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Mar 11 16:07 UTC 1996 |
I was waiting for someone to say what Rane did in #14. I do
think it is bleak indeed. We need to promote the conferences better.
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kerouac
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response 19 of 113:
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Mar 11 20:14 UTC 1996 |
The situation is bleak. Agora used to come close to or over 200 messages
before each restart, now the last two or three versions have been peaking
at 120-130. General on M-Net gets more entries than that in a month. You
can tell things are bad when in the last two years, response levels in
grex's busiest conference have dropped by a third at the same time user
loads are growing.
I suppose whether you think this is critical depends on what you
perceive grex's main function to be. If you think the conferencing is
grex's raison d'etre, then things are bad. But if you view grex's
longterm role as that of a service provider, and not an "electronic
community", then maybe its not that bad. Usage is up. Even if the confs
die out altogether, grex is serving a purpose by providing free email
and low cost net access. And the party conf is always popular, especially
with younger users.
There are obviously plenty of grex users who dont care, need, or use
the conferencing, so grex could probably do just fine if picospan was
taken out altogether. But the question is whether grex REALLY fulfills
its mission without a vital conferencing environment. In my personal
view, wiring everyone up to email and the 'net doesnt form a community,
and something is wrong if so many more people are "using" grex as
opposed to trying to be a part of it.
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adbarr
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response 20 of 113:
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Mar 12 01:47 UTC 1996 |
Perhaps Grex should insist on a ring and being kissed first?
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arianna
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response 21 of 113:
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Mar 12 03:46 UTC 1996 |
I liked seeing .poetry so high on the list!
Hoorah! Huzzah! People really *do* read my (seldom posted) poems.
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carson
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response 22 of 113:
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Mar 12 12:58 UTC 1996 |
ahem.
I'm wondering why Rane, Richard, and STeve are describing these
statistics as "bleak." I don't feel that they are at all, for
several reasons:
1) Maybe I've managed to totally isolate myself from things Grexian,
but the conferences that I buzz through, as a general rule of thumb,
don't seem to be any less active than when I first began reading
them umpteen months ago.
2) Quantity certainly isn't quality. Kerouac likes to point out that
M-Net's general conference tends to be of greater size than Agora.
I'd counter that argument by pointing out how high a percentage of
M-Net's general is simply drivel and tag-team drift. We've had our
share of that, and I'd rather not seek that level of contribution
out, thank you.
3) Rane notes, and probably with great precision, that upwards of 90%
of the participation files are owned by lurkers. That doesn't bother
me in the slightest; most people lurk before finding something where
they wish to contribute. I'd like to think that I was just speaking
from personal experience, but it's a tale I've seen repeated many a
time here.
4) STeve gives a number of about 6000 current accounts on Grex (yep,
some are silly psuedos, but there were pribly enough accounts created
yesterday to cover for that subtraction). About how many of those
are active users of Grex, say, using their account at least once a
week? I think that a profile of those users would give a better
picture of Grex's user base, not to mention a less "bleak" one.
For kicks, perhaps grab a look at how many .partymsg files there are?
I really tire of the gotterdammerung that surrounds the discussions of
conferencing. Yes, I like to see new faces in the conferences that I read
as much as the next user. Maybe that's why I spend part of my time on the
system talking those conferences up. Heck, I even spend part the time
going through conferences myself, so that there's something worth reading
once those people get there.
For that matter, even "dead" conferences can be revitalized. Just take a
look at the "social" conference sometime, or the games conference. TLC can
go a long way. Rhetoric just won't do the trick. If you _really_ think
conferencing has become "bleak," then perhaps you should begin by doing
something to "brighten" those conferences you're interested in.
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popcorn
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response 23 of 113:
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Mar 12 14:22 UTC 1996 |
Ditto to what Carson said.
(By the way, there are 3132 .partymsg files on Grex. That's a file that is
created in each person's home directory when they run party.)
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rcurl
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response 24 of 113:
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Mar 12 16:23 UTC 1996 |
The conferences in which I am primarily interested are not social, but
topical - books, environment, radio, hardware and micros, nature, etc.
Some have more activity than others, but activity is by any measure
very light. There are few participants, and starting new threads often
garner very little response. However I *know* that in the Ann Arbor
community there are many people doing many things in all of these
topical areas: they are not doing it on Grex. My contributions (and
sometimes external urgings) haven't changed that. So, I've done things
to "brighten" the conferences in which I am interested - and the
situation is bleak: most of the topical conferences are not serving
a significant community purpose.
I think that is the measure that carson is not considering - perhaps
he finds enough activity to keep him happy - but is it serving the
community in any significant way? That's what Grex was founded to do,
not to just be the personal playtoy of a small fringe.
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