At 23:21 01-05-2002 -0500, John Horn wrote: >I'd like to make a suggestion to the Brin-l statistics page. On the page >showing the number of posts per member, would it be possible to put the date >of the most recent post of each given person. I think that would be very >interesting to see and would show which of those people are still active >members of the list and which have been gone for a while.
Theoretically: yes. Technically: yes. Practically: er... er... Adding that information is doable. Keeping it up-to-date is not really a problem either. The problem lies in the initial setup: there are currently 318 people listed on that page, which means I will have to do 318 searches in the Archive to retrieve the date on which someone sent his/her latest post. Searching through the entire Archive takes Eudora anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes per search on this computer (Intel Celeron 700 MHz, 256 MB RAM). Multiply that by 318 and you get up to 1590 minutes or 26.5 hours of search time. Add the amount of time needed to add the found date to the Rankings page 318 times and you will end up with er... spending an awful lot of time. If all messages had already been entered in the Index Of The Great Brin-L Archive, the results would be on-line before you had finished reading this message. But since I have not yet developed the needed database, let alone fill it... >I recently was wondering if a certain person had dropped off the list and >had to go through many pages on the Yahoo group page to find the last post >from that person. Fortunately, the post was only about 3 weeks ago but if >it had been longer it would have taken a long time (or I would have given >up). As an alternative, you could ask a listowner to check if someone is still subscribed if you REALLY need to know. (Whenever I pull a subscriber list from the server, I usually receive it within a few minutes after sending the request.) >Or is this too much of a bother... It is somewhat of a bother, yes. But that could be reduced if you could manage to either supply me with some more spare time or some hard cash... :-) You can get it good, fast or cheap. Any two. :-) Jeroen _________________________________________________________________________ Wonderful World of Brin-L Website: http://www.Brin-L.com Tom's Photo Gallery: http://tom.vanbaardwijk.com
