Source of Stats (was Re: Retreating to the safety of OTChatter)

[David]

I alleged:

> > The posting rate is, in fact, about 800 a day at the moment.  
> There 
> > were over 180 posts in the first three hours after the list 
> 
> > The join rate is between 100 and 150 a day
> 
Dumbledad wrote:

> Where do these stats come from? Surely not from the search engine 
> that should not be named. Do people keep comprehensive alternate 
> back-ups of all the email? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

I have three methods: good record keeping, elfing numbers database, 
careful watching of the lists, and fanatical devotion to HP... Er, 
*four* methods.  My *four* methods are...

You probably know that, in an attempt to keep measured, high quality 
adult discussion, new members of HPFGU are moderated, which means 
their posts are reviewed by members of the admin team before being 
forwarded to the list (or sent back for editing).  We also try to 
send a personal welcome letter to everybody who joins.

We reckoned therefore a few months back that we might have a lot of 
work to do at the time of OOP release, and decided to keep a record 
of the number of newbies joining every day (the assigned list-elf 
for the day enters the number of letters sent, in the record, as 
part of their work for the day.

At the same time I decided to keep track of posting volume.  That's 
actually quite easy to do if you keep on top of it:  I keep an Excel 
spreadsheet, and simply enter the last message number of each day 
against the date.  Every few days I spend a few minutes updating 
it.  I simply scroll back through the list and look for the change 
of date.

One thing we've discovered as a result is that if there's a spike of 
new members joining, then a week or two later there's a sharp 
increase in message volume.

However, as a mechanism for preparing for OOP, it was largely a 
failure: nothing in the past behaviour of the list hinted at the 
magnitude of the current frenzy of joining and posting.

You can imagine the elfing team have been working quite hard right 
now - well some of them, anyway: others of us just fiddle around 
with statistics and engage in pointless threads like this one.

As for comprehensive backups of all the email, there are three 
little-known open-membership Yahoogroups:

groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives  
groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives2
groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives3  

which contain zipped-up archives, maintained by Paul Kippes, of the 
HPFGU messages, batched a thousand messages at a time.

If anyone is interested in the mechanics of how the list is run, 
feel free to write to us at HPforGrownups-owner at yahoogroups.com

David