Monday, February 6th, 2006, 7:26 am
Newsgroups Statistics
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HIS morning I found (and began playing with) a GPL‘d newsgroups statistics tool (homepage of the project). I compiled it from source code without the QT GUI and off I went experimenting. In case you choose to run that tool as well, there is an ample manual for its command-line mode.
I have reported a serious documentation bug to the author — a bug that cost me a fair bit of time. To quote the report, in case this helps somebody else:
In Turquoise 2.2, the help bit says:
Usage: turqstat [options] outputfile areadef(s)Shouldn’t the ourputfile precede the
[options]? It took me a very long
time to realise that.
Having run it successfully ‘off-line’, script invocation has been made a weekly cron job (i.e. a job which is scheduled to run repeatedly by a daemon). I decided that I can only post its output to forums where:
- My participation is noticeable and is decent
- My presence goes back a long time into the past
- The amount of involvement and activity is high, or else there is not much to gauge. Statistics become uninteresting otherwise.
- Nobody else generates statistics already
For the time being, I will generate and publish statistics for the search engines and Palm newsgroups only.
