Could you help please?
 
I am a doctoral student doing my Ph.D thesis on participation on
public academic online forums (LISTSERV forums). One
important variable in my study is "the number of regular
contributors". I used the Stats command to retrieve the message
contribution statistics but encountered a problem. This is the
situation:
 
1) I need to gather the contribution statistics for the 11 lists
mentioned below in order to get their regular contributors.
 
2) I send a Stats (name of the list) command to the listserv
address of each list and I got the STATREPS for each list.
 
3) Then I proceeded to count the number of messages per address
(first I sorted the list so I could add the messages for members
with more than one address).
 
4) When I finished counting the messages and doing the frequency
distributions I realized that the number of messages recorded in
the STATREP record was substantially less that the total No. of
messages reported in the STATREP record as Total mail. e.g
BIOPI-L Total mail = 340 and I counted only 129 messages and so on
for the rest of the lists as is shown below.
 
 
 
Lists          STATREP start date of         Total No. messgs.
               gathering the statistics      and actual No.
                                             messgs. in record
 
BIOPI-L        June 5  1991 (985 days)        340 (120)
 
COMDEV         Dec. 21 1992 (422 days)        139 (60)
 
EDUTEL         Dec. 31 1992 (412 days)        174 (174) most messgs
                                             in moderator's address
 
IPCT-L         Feb. 22 1992 (723 days)      4781 (4781) most messgs
                                             in moderator's address
 
MUSIC-ED       March 16 1989 (1796 days)      151 (88)
 
QUALRS-L       March 17 1992 (699 days)     3329 (731)
 
SCREEN-L       March 15 1991 1067 days)     5210 (869)
 
SEMIOS-L       August 11 1992 (552 days)    4060 (296)
 
STUTT-L        Dec. 4 1989                  1401 (179)
 
There are two other list for which I need the contribution
frequencies (STLHE-L and TESL-L), but they look like having the
same problem. However, TESL-L STATREP has as the start date for
gathering the stats as November 19 1993 (88 days) and the total No.
of messages is 1195 (In August 1993 the start date of gathering the
stats was March 21 1991 and the total No. of messages was 6496 ).
I retrieved the lists STATREP records on the 14th of February 1994.
 
Is there a solution to this problem in terms of being able to
retrieve the whole record of contributed messages?
 
I already looked in the EARN association LISTSERV user guide and
found nothing that could help me.
 
 
If you have a solution to this problem it would be greatly
appreciated.
 
Alejandra Rojo
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Toronto, Canada