Group stats?

[Muggles]

I was wondering how or where we get those monthly repair group stats? Is there a url that I can view? I can't seem to find any links to stats via google groups.

[Gordon Shumway]

"badgolferman" posts stats for this group every month. Look for his posts.

[gfretwell]

I think it is a service for Deja News users. I have not been able to duplicate it at Giga News.

[Muggles]

That's right. I couldn't remember the name, but I was hoping there was a url where I could look at the stats myself mid-month. I kind of like to play with them and see what the numbers say.

[badgolferman]

As has been mentioned, my newsreader has a function that tabulates the messages to the group which I will post once a month. It's entirely dependent upon my downloading the messages so it can read headers and some content.

Google Groups has a rudimentary statistics page for each group as well. I cannot speak for its accuracy since I'm rather certain they honor the X-Noarchive setting that certain people like to use so their messages won't be archived by newsservers. Here's the one for alt.home.repair:

[Muggles]

Thanks! You're right in saying the gg stats page is rudimentary!

[Muggles]

Hey, I was looking on google, out of curiosity sake, to see if other news readers had the option for group statistics like yours has, and turns out that Mesnews does statistics. I have an old copy of it, so I thought I'd check it out and see what it showed, if anything useful at all. Took me a while to update it and then download the repair group posts, and then try their stats report.

Anyway, I wanted to ask you what you (or anyone else interested) thought of the stats it provided? I converted it to a pdf and uploaded here so you/anyone could get a look at it.

[badgolferman]

Those are certainly more comprehensive than what my newsreader shows, but I question the necessity for most of those statistics. Not only that, hardly anyone here would bother reading 23 pages of group statistics.

At the time I was switching from Outlook Express to a new newsreader I experimented with several available ones before settling on Xananews. Mesnews, Dialog and Xnews were others I tried extensively but in the end I found Xananews closest to Outlook Express and it just fit my eye better. The range of customization is endless and it doesn't use a scoring system for filtering articles which I found confusing. These days it seems most people prefer Thunderbird but I haven't progressed that far yet.

[Muggles]

Well, the report can be edited to have less information, plus, I had to change the view of the original doc file so all columns would fit on the page, which, made it more pages. What I found interesting was the number of different people who actually post to the repair group - over

200 different people just in the first 17 days of the this month. Also, the percentages it showed of how often people posted. It would have been easy to just take the top 20 of everything and just show a few pages of stats, too, but since it was the first time I thought I'd show everything mesnews tallied up.

Is Xananews a paid news reader? I've not looked that one up or seen it on any of my searches.

[badgolferman]

No, it's free. It was abandoned by the original developer after he got involved in World of Warcraft. Another guy recently took it over and has been working on it. Frankly I haven't kept up to date because it works perfectly fine for me and I have modified mine to make it a no install program and the newer versions broke that so I reverted back.

[Muggles]

Is it portable?

[badgolferman]

Yes, but not natively. Requires editing of a XML configuration file. I'm not sure if newer versions have become more capable of being portable since I don't participate in the newsgroup anymore.

[Muggles]

k thanks for the info.