At 06:03 PM 8/25/1997 -0400, Russ wrote:
>It would be nice to get a little summary of the day's activities on my
>Listserv, similar to the error monitoring report, emailed to the
>listowner. What I'd like to get is;
>
>- Number of new subscribers
>- Number of subscribers who removed themselves
>- Number of posts to the list

Interesting idea.  Data would be interesting to look at.  But what GOOD is
it???

First, don't get me wrong....I'm not opposed to such data being reported,
and I'd have no objection to Eric developing this feature, but it sure
wouldn't be high on my list.

Now to my question above....

I'm a librarian, network manager, statistics pro, etc.  Therefore I get
questions all the time for statistical reports.  Obviously we can produce
literally TONS of stats in a library.  And, for example, we produce reports
on circulation (number of books checked out) by hour and by day, and a
table of hours vs. days.  These have a value to the managers who can work
out patterns of usage so that the right numbers of people can be on duty at
the right time.  All sorts of businesses do this kind of thing, and it is
good and useful for staffing plans.

OTOH, I've also been asked for breakdowns on class status (fresh, soph, jr,
sr, grad)  vs. days of week.  I asked why.  The manager's answer was
"because it would be nice to know".  I said why do you need to know?
Answer was "because I'd like to know if freshman check out more books on
monday or seniors check out more books on thursday, that kind of thing".
Again, I asked what value this would be.  Well, there wasn't any besides
that she wanted it.  I explained that checking a book out was checking a
book out, no matter of year in school, kind of book, etc.  Didn't matter.
(We have mag stripe ID cards that are swiped, followed by scanning barcode
on back of each book...computer and staff doing it don't care about
anything else).  Well, after I said no, we didn't have time for that, she
appealed to big boss.  And I did NOT end up doing such a dumb report.

So, to me at least, as owner of a dozen lists for over seven years, the
stuff you list might be "nice to know", but not of any value to me or to
anyone else, unless doing some kind of strange research project on list
activities.  I'll also say from experience, that if such stats are there,
then people are going to want weekly summaries, monthly ones, annual ones,
ones by academic semester, all-time cumulations, etc, etc.

I would be interested in the answers to my questions regarding your data.
But regardless I'll not object if Eric wanted to do.....I just can't figure
out why he would.

cheers

dan

Dan Lester
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In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  Erasmus, 1534