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Newsgroups = personal trading centre?
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user



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 72

PostPosted: Sun Feb 24, 2002 11:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oblio wrote:

2. At least since ABMAR is its own group administrators can seperately control it in terms of retention. Frankly, if I ran a news server, I would force the thing to 1 or 2 days retention and walk away. Its a repost group after all. I don't know what policies are for real admins though.


I think admins of premium servers would be inclined to keep retention in .repost groups the same as in the rest of their binaries groups; after all, rentention (and completeness) are their main selling points.

Quote:

Both trading and abmar volume are problems, but I don't know how to fix them.


To paraphrase the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, "entropy always increases." I suspect education is the only practical solution, but how to do it for a group whose sole purpose is for reposts is still beyond me. Sometimes I long for the old days when most servers still accepted cancels and thus retromodding. Wink
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Onakra



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 89
Location: Geldrop, Netherlands

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 1:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree with user and think education at this point won't be helpful at all. It works well in the main groups, but I suspect 'DBZ-fanbase' style responses to anything similar in ABMAR.

The group is there, and they don't feel like they're doing anything wrong. Technically they are correct as well, since it is a repost group. Now to get into everybodies head that full reposts within 2 weeks probably aren't necessary anymore is another thing...

Premium newsservers are, like Melchior said, not that expensive either. But getting a 'real' leech to spend money besides his ISP is also one of those hard points to sell.

I may be a pessimist, but I think any attempt to 'regulate' (as in give friendly advise) ABMAR will have no effect anymore.


Onakra
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Melchior



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 190
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 7:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Onakra wrote:

I may be a pessimist, but I think any attempt to 'regulate' (as in give friendly advise) ABMAR will have no effect anymore.


I'm not quite such a pessimist-- I think that messages could be posted to ABMAR indicating that it alone is taking up 1% of Usenet's volume ("if every other repost group out there did this, you'd have maybe 3 hours of retention!"), and that perhaps restraint would be a good idea and personal trading should be kept to a minimum on the repost group-- include links to FAQs on how to trade by other means-- icq, hotline, irc, etc. The message would need links to back up the 1% argument.
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Keikai



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 178
Location: Miami, FL

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 9:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well these BBs are definately serving their purpose. I'm learning all sorts of things. Too many articles to quote at this point so I'll just comment on concepts.

Re: % of usenet - That is shocking. I admit I rarely need to visit ABMAR so I was unaware of how busy it had become. I did suggest that we urge people to use ABMAR for trading in an earlier post here. I'd like to retract that (of at least amend it). I had no idea how much was being posted there.

Re: Eduction - I think this is still a very important tool. I admit there will be a percentage, even a relatively large percentage, that will ignore advice initially and, of course, those who become belligerent. But just like there are always trolls there are also always people who want to do things right but manage to get "right" wrong. For them, education is key and we've all seen it happen. Even those who don't like being told what to do often fall into line a month or two later (or disappear entirely).

Re: Timeshifted reposts - Well I'm certainly guilty of this one. Although they used to work rather well. I suppose I didn't adjust to the times fully when I started using parchive files as I used them in addition to my full reposts. I'll stop this activity in the future. Didn't even realize people were against them but after the above BB discussions I can understand why.

To sum up my opinions as they stand (I say this since I'm quite willing to have my mind changed), I do think having some sort of trading policy for AB(M)A is a good idea. I do think limited trading of things to ABMAR not recently posted is still a good idea. But I do think ABMAR needs its own policy on this.

Actually something true in all of the groups is that people aren't using the posted episodes guide at animeusenet nearly enough. Honestly, when we were trying to get ABMAR chartered I had, in my mind, the idea that ABMAR should be used for any reposts that have been posted to the main groups within a year. Now while I now think that is not a good figure and that ABMAR might need its own figure, the idea is not bad. I don't mean to suggest rules either, but rather guidelines and gentle but consistent education of posters about those guidelines can have a profound effect, IMO.

Okay, feel free to change my mind now. Wink


Last edited by Keikai on Mon Feb 25, 2002 1:06 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Tobias Rieper



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 41
Location: Berlin, Germany

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 12:31 pm    Post subject: The link Reply with quote

Okay, here is the link to the statistics:

http://newsadmin.com/spamreports.htm

I used the 'Top 100 by bytes', but the others are interesting too...
They look like updated daily. Yesterday, ABMAR was on 9th place with 2%, and today, ABA is at #6 with 2%... (The low ranking of ABMA is because they count the crossposts to ABA and ABMA only in ABA.)

T.Rieper
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Onakra



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 89
Location: Geldrop, Netherlands

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 12:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow, thanks for that link Tobias. I had never so much fun in reading numbers... Smile

The Significant Message Activity Changes is nice: 2,6 GB posted more in the past day(?) at a 181% change.

Scary to see that ABA is there on the 6th place with bytes posted per day(?) at 6,7 GB. It's even higher then most of the *.image and *.movies groups. I know activity is high in ABA/ABMA, but I would never have guessed that high.


Onakra
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Keikai



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 178
Location: Miami, FL

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 1:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks very much for the link, Tobias. It's even looks to be maintained by one of the commercial servers to which I am subscribed and I was completely unaware of it (Pathlink == Newsguy).

That really is, like Onakra said, some interesting reading. I'm astounded how busy our groups can get when compared to what I thought were the heavyweights! Obviously this is a "heavy" day but it is still shockiing.

(And what the heck is alt.chello.binaries? 12G posted? I'm almost temped to subscribe to it just to find out. Razz )
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user



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 72

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 1:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If I'm not mistaken, chello is (was?) one of the largest ISP's in Europe (or maybe just the Netherlands?), and a.c.b might be one of their public newsgroups. I see people always asking for Supernews to add it to their list of groups, and SN always denies the req, since a.c.b's name doesn't fall under SN's policy of "binary groups must have a name of alt.binaries.*"...
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Tobias Rieper



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 41
Location: Berlin, Germany

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 1:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Onakra wrote:

Scary to see that ABA is there on the 6th place with bytes posted per day(?) at 6,7 GB. It's even higher then most of the *.image and *.movies groups. I know activity is high in ABA/ABMA, but I would never have guessed that high.


Well, this is just today. (Macross, Photon, ROD, FMP, Metropolis... we had a lot of posts today.) Yesterday, ABA was on #24 or so.

The anime groups are often hopping the ranking up and down, but AFAIR we always had at least one group in the top 15.

Maybe that's why the alt.config'ers are so pissed off about us...

T.Rieper
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Melchior



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 190
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 2:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another interesting point that could be taken from those statistics is that we're using more than our fair share of bandwidth:

ABA is 6th for posting volume, with 2.15% of the day's total posts, compared to it ranking in 98th place for daily readership, at only 0.20% of usenet's viewed newsgroups... And there's ABMAR, which doesn't even rank in the top 100 for readership...

I also never realized how significant porn was on the net-- in the top-100 groups by readership, porn groups are the overwhelming majority! Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with that, just that I find it surprising that it's *that* substantial, with ABMEA getting 4 times ABA's readership, and ABPEA getting twice ABA's...

Statistics are cool!
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Onakra



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 89
Location: Geldrop, Netherlands

PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2002 4:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

user wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, chello is (was?) one of the largest ISP's in Europe (or maybe just the Netherlands?)


Yep, Chello (my ISP) is one of the 'biggie's' in Europe. Don't know the exact statistics, but it's pretty large. Owned by United Pan-Europe Communications (UPC) it's a daugther of UnitedGlobalCom, which is quite big in the world if I have to believe their site. Too bad Chello's service is about -60%.

Just recently they managed to delete my useraccount (with mail and website) during a migration. They never even noticed it. After waiting on hold for about 40 minutes you get a moron on the phone who starts reading his guidebook: "restart the PC, restart the cablemodem, etc" ARRGGHHH Evil or Very Mad

No kidding, today's a busy day. With the 2 #AMPEG SVCDs and the 1st part of Green Ran that has been started you already have roughly 35*15 + 25*15 + 61*10 = 1,5GB. Whatever happened to ~200MB a day per person? Yes, I'm glad to get all those great new releases, but would pacing it a bit be so hard?Yeah, I'll stop here before...


Onakra
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Tobias Rieper



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 41
Location: Berlin, Germany

PostPosted: Tue Feb 26, 2002 12:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Melchior wrote:

I also never realized how significant porn was on the net-- in the top-100 groups by readership, porn groups are the overwhelming majority! Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with that, just that I find it surprising that it's *that* substantial, with ABMEA getting 4 times ABA's readership, and ABPEA getting twice ABA's...


Well, many people on the net are still on low bandwidth pay per minute connections. They can't effort to look in the multimedia groups, but the picture groups are possible.

I'm doing AB(M)A(R) since I got a flatrate (2000), but ABPEA I'm harvesting since I learned about the usenet (1997)... Twisted Evil
ABMEA evolved out of requests and discussion in ABPEA and since the traffic is bearable even for low speed cons and the content is of vital interest for the ABPEA people, many of them go there too...

T.Rieper
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Vox Necros



Joined: 17 Feb 2002
Posts: 8

PostPosted: Thu Mar 28, 2002 6:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tobias Rieper wrote:

The servers of many people became more crappy. But instead of getting the hint and going to a premium NSP, they stay at the servers of their ISPs. And they're grouping in ABMAR to compensate for the holes in the main groups.


Unfortunately pay servers aren't even near an option for a great many people. I often see "well, why don't you just get a pay server?" type comments. However, not everyone can afford to get a pay server. There's quite a few people out there who are hard-pressed to pay for the net.

Personally, I wish ISPs would actually make the effort to have a decent news servers. At least trying to get complete posts in the first place. Even if the retention is only 1-day, if the post came through COMPLETE there would likely be less repost requests...
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