Re: Reply quoted -- MIDRANGE-L

> I wonder how many people use digest mode, and is it because they pay for
>  connect time.. or what...?!?

Once upon a time I was getting beaten up because apparently I not do a good
job of being digest mode in what comes out of my mouth, and often feel the
need to comment on stuff about which my knowledge is so limited I not know it
is limited.

One of the grievances was that people in other countries pay for their
internet connections by different plans than we in the USA & there's also
Rick's complaint about excess baggage.

Once upon a time David had statistics you could get at that showed # of
individual posts, in a time period, that perhaps needed to also show byte
count, and #s of users by list. http://www.midrange.com/liststats.htm

You could see # lurkers by comparing the fact that there were like 1,000
subscribers to this or that list, but a small # of people doing all the
talking.  You can also get a bit of a drift of this by going to the archives
& checking the author index.

Perhaps there might be value in statistics that show # subscribers
regular vs. digest
USA vs. other continents
if that would not be a violation of privacy of those participants.

Here is how it was done before David changed the list software (cut & paste
from my folder on stuff I want to remember but might not want to access for a
few months)

Subj:   Re: Archives **** & other Cool stuff
Date:   01/08/2001 2:23:05 PM Central Standard Time

>  Al,
>
>  <snip>
>  >We can do things like get at statistics on the traffic in our list
>  >like the following:
>  >
>  >Mail Traffic Report for list 'midrange-l' for Sun Jan  7 17:45:01 2001
>  <snip>
>
>  How did you get this?  I could find no reference for this, either in the
>  majordomo "help" message, or on the midrange.com website.  Are there other
>  goodies that the majordomo "help" message fails to mention?

This e-mail will tell you how to get at this particular goodie, but part of
the answer is I do not know what other goodies might be there, and some of
this stuff is so obtuse from the existing directories that a good time to
review room to suggest improvements is in the wake of the site update.

Is there any point to re-writing the monthly message that no one reads, or
reducing the lines added to the foot of midrange dot com lists to basically
focus on how to unsubscribe, who the moderator is, and get at where this kind
of stuff is documented.  Where should links to this be added & should this
kind of information be available to non-subscribers to lists.  Think about
that then make a suggestion to David Gibbs where we think the best place
should be for what links to what.

While the archives are subscriber e-mail addresses cleaned off, the
statistics are not ... I cleaned that off before posting to the ***** Cool
Reminders **** because on BPCS_L especially, but also to lesser degree on
MIDRANGE_L there had been several recent posts from people who said they were
new to these lists, new to BPCS, new to AS/400.

I sent an e-mail ... subject can be left blank since it is not used, to
MAJORDOMO@midrange.com

with just a few lines ... you cut & paste & see this for yourself

lists
get bpcs-l info.list-stats
get midrange-l info.list-stats
end

If you follow along the "help" document & try out some commands, a lot of
them are disabled, so it is apparent that Dave's majordomo "help" is the
standard one that comes with any upgrade to that software.

One thing I am looking for is having my users access archives without them
having to be members of the various lists, until they find there is a lot of
info in the archives that they want to participate in the discussion.

Some of these things we can get at ... well you have to be a member of the
list to get at the stuff.

How did I get the specifics of the command
get bpcs-l info.list-stats

Well I remembered we could do this, I just did not remember how, and I hoped
that I could figure it out from the help suggestions, but I could not, so I
searched for the last time the topic came up ... now I suspect that if we did
a search of the archives for ***** Admin, we might find more such goodies
announced when they first came out, but before we joined these lists.

Can we do stuff like this with majordomo on other lists we subscribe to from
places other than midrange dot com?  Is this a standard for the internet, or
something in which midrange dot com leads the competition?  If we ever wanted
to moderate some discussion, could we get this feature?

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)