[Beowulf] [OT] HPC and University IT - forum/mailing list?

[Jim Lux]

At 09:28 PM 8/13/2006, Brian Dobbins wrote:


>   So if it were a democratic process, I'd vote to keep it here, but if a
>new list/site is created, I'll go wherever the information is.  (How
>many subscribers are on this list now anyways?  The www.beowulf.org
>website says, "Over 3,000 researchers, engineers, students, and software
>developers have participated in these online discussions since 1996."
>but it doesn't say how many are subscribed now.)


If I had to guess..  there's about 3 or 4 dozen active participants (in 
that they post quasi regularly, on a variety of topics, as opposed to a one 
shot "here's a problem I need help with" and then fade away). One could 
look at the last year's posting authors, for instance, to get a handle on it.

I suspect there's 10-20 times as many mostly passive readers of the list 
(although they pop up periodically when there's something of 
interest).  But I have no idea if that is true.. only the list manager 
knows for sure, and of course, how many of the 
non-regularly-posting-read-only subscribers just spool it into some archive 
unread is also unknown (such are the quandaries facing folks who buy and 
sell advertising in any medium).

However, I am going to surprise myself.. Using state of the art analytical 
tools (IE, Word, and Excel), I have determined that there were 1419 posts 
in the first 6 months of 2006, and of those, there were 275 unique posters.

There were 10 posters who posted more than 25 times, and 34 who posted 10 
or more times.

Statistics are below..

I'm sure someone can do something more elegant.. perhaps look at number of 
threads participated in or time distribution of posts.  A fine topic for a 
sociologist to write their master's thesis on ("social dynamics of internet 
mailing list participation") and then, they could do modeling (using a 
Beowulf, of course) for their doctorate. Perhaps there are canonical list 
behaviors and list participation styles?

Jim

# of Posts Frequency
1 134
2 52
3 21
4 13
5 9
6 3
7 7
8 1
9 1
10 3
11 3
12 4
13 1
14 1
15 2
16 1

18 3
19 1
20 1

22 1
23 2
24 1

29 1
30 2

41 2

53 1

78 1

80 1
81 1

104 1