Newps wrote:
Larry Dighera wrote:

the world doesn't see any of it.


Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but upon what do you base that
opinion?

There's maybe 50 people here. Even if there are several times that that
never post, highly unlikely, this group, as any group, is irrelavant.

Your estimate is _way_ low. According to this site:

http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/ReportCard.aspx

there were 850 distinct posters to this group so far this year. And there
were 2264 distinct posters to this group in 2006. It would take an awful
lot of duplicate handles to reduce the count of distinct people to the 50
range.

And Google Groups alone counts 1088 people subscribed to the group via its
interface to Usenet:

http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?...23723&expand=1

And the count of lurkers who only read is unknown - though I've heard
ratios of anywhere from about 5-to-1 to 50-to-1 for other groups where
someone tried to make estimates (presumably by running stats on NNTP
traffic or in the old days, maybe via root scans of people's .newsrc?)

In fact it should be possible to get a ballpark estimate of the lurker-to-
active ratio by counting the number of distinct posters who posted from
google.com and dividing the 1088 number by that count.

Therefore it seems reasonable to claim that there are several thousand
people who read this newsgroup. It might even reach into the ten thousand
range.