On Monday, April 03, 2006 08:13, Dr. Core wrote: > Well we learnt quite a few things from this pointless exercise. > Thanks to -Z- we now know that are 271 email addresses on the list. > In about 8 hours (in Eastern US office hours on a weekday), we had > about 20 _human_ responders. That's pretty low. We probably should > have a whole week before jumping to conclusions. But it's not too > crazy to suggest that well under half of the 271 email addresses > represent a real human reader.
Don't forget the 80-20 Rule: in almost every human endeavor, only about 20% of the nominal participants account for about 80% of the positive activity. In terms of a BBS or mailing list, this translate to about 80% of the memberships being "lurkers" and about 20% being active posters. And, carrying that to its logical conclusion, about 20% of the active posters account for about 80% of the posts. Before my stroke, I was one of the 20% of the active 20%, commenting on just about everything, but now I'm among the 80% of the active 20%, chiming in only when I feel my input might actually be salutary... > That's just the way it is, there are only about 10 active posters and > probably under 150 actual readers. Along this line, Gunota gets about > 3400 unique visitors a day. Where's GML in the grand scheme of > things? Would we be happier if GML sits somewhere above 10% of > Gunota's readership? > > Anyway if you watch the human behaviors (not listserve's > functionality) you would probably agree that if and when we move to a > GML Mk.III we will have difficulty moving people (not just the email > addresses) over. No matter how clear and simple we make it. Remember > the move from Mk.I to Mk.II? Months after the move we were still > getting stragglers "discovering" us and said things like "no one told > me there's a move!". Who knows how many we lost permanently? That's where having the List address list available on demand is among its more useful features. Whoever's coordinating the move can use the list to send announcements to each and every subscriber directly to notify the membership of the impending move, transition status and activation of the new list. By the way, the current lack of an active Web interface, such as the original Gundam.com archive page, which presented the postings in something approaching real time, may be partly responsible the lack of spam on GML-Mk2. The list itself is effectively invisible and the current archive doesn't display addresses, only handles. Fortunately, the Mail-Archive.com screening mechanism extends to body of the messages as well the headers, Subject and To/From lines, so those posted their addresses did NOT have them exposed to spambots or even less sophisticated harvesting methods. No harm, no foul, but it's still better to be safe than sorry, hence my intervention... -Z- -------------------------------------------------- The Gundam Mailing List MK-II [email protected] Archives: http://www.gundam.com/gml Help: Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this in the BODY: help list
