On Thu, 10 Feb 1994 23:27:55 GMT "John W. Redelfs" <[log in to unmask]> said: >I've noticed that the number of nodes in the PEERS database is down from >last year, and I know of a number of Listserv lists that are being moved >to other platforms. While the number of servers is decreasing, the number of lists and subscribers, and above all the traffic, keep increasing steadily. Before the summer there were 3-4 million daily deliveries on an average weekday. Now it is more like 5-6 million! 5893k on Thursday. The number of subscriptions has increased by about 500k since 9211. These figures do take into account the loss of 25 servers over the same period. When you look at the charts you wouldn't be able to tell when servers left the network. The only exception is 9402 when most of France left BITNET without registering a :newnode tag in advance. This was the largest drop-out in the history of BITNET. All the users got deleted from the lists since their addresses no longer worked and this caused a visible drop in the figures. >Why is this happening? Many universities are getting rid of mainframes. Some move their lists to another machine, but in some cases there is no other suitable mainframe in the university, while in others local politics require the service to be physically located "in our department" and not "run by the bozos at the XYZ dept" :-) LISTSERV isn't available for unix yet so people move to other products, which as you said aren't quite as comprehensive. Eric