Python Forum

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:15:20 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

> So?  NNTP is the living dead.  Time to let it go.

So you say. I think the millions of posts on Usenet say different.

According to Wikipedia, the average number of all text posts in the Big-8 
newsgroups is 1,800 new messages every hour. That excludes binary groups, 
where the amount of traffic is much, much bigger.

Sure, a lot of those 1,800 posts are spam, but the spammers wouldn't 
waste their time if they didn't think there were people still on Usenet.



> Most people use this list via e-mail,

How do you know? Do you have evidence for this, or are you just making it 
up? 

In a later post, you claimed the evidence is:

"Scan through a bunch of threads with show-headers.  Watch the User-Agent
value (set by the senders client).  The results become obvious pretty
quickly."

Or in other words, a non-random selection of posts followed by an error-
prone and subjective test.

I've picked seven posts from this thread, from seven different users, and 
I get these User Agents:

User-Agent    Count    Mail or News?
none          1        unknown
Mozilla/5.0   1        Both
Gnus/5.13     2        Both
G2/1.0        2        Web (interface to News)
Thunderbird   1        Both

I happen to know at least one of the Gnus users is using News, so that's 
1 definite News, 2 Web, 4 either News or email, and no definite email.


-- 
Steven