Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Time for rec.arts.int-fiction.moderated?
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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 02:27:04 GMT
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atholbrose  <cinnamon@one.net> wrote:
>buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett) wrote in
>> Assuming google's poor counting is consistent, well...
>It is consistent, but not linear. Actual number of threads for Feb 1 - Feb
>19 2001: 116. Actual number of posts: 1193. What is that, a 45% increase in
>volume? Nothing near what the raw numbers Google spits out would indicate.

Ok, huh.

>> Maybe IF creation
>> is experiencing an upsurge in popularity, but the evidence--
>> trolls, long off-topic threads, people leaving the newsgroup,
>> the numbers shown by google--add up pretty obviously, to
>> me at least.
>
>I think it's much more due to the popularity of the interactive fiction
>competition, which actually gets press many places,

No more votes this year than in the past, I don't think. Same (or less?)
coverage in slashdot this year as the last.

>and the widespread use
>of if on palmtop devices.

Also, neither of those is reflected in r.g.i-f.

>How many copies of the printed Inform manual were
>sold?

That was the one factor I had in mind when I said "maybe
IF creation is experiencing an upsurge in poularity".

>How many more competition games were there in 2001 than in 2000?

Fewer.

>How any more games were released overall?

I'd guess fewer/"about the same", discounting speedIFs (which
don't generate r.a.i-f traffic for obvious timing reasons).

>Let's also take a look at those threads from 2001
[snip]
>Whew. Anyways, at a glance, just as much visibly off-topic stuff as we've
>got now. Perhaps a bit less troll-inspired, but still about the same.

Well, ok. Maybe so. There's still twice as much of it,
I'd imagine, based on the overall 2x increase. (Now you'll
go count THAT too and prove me wrong.)

>When there are only about 100 posts a day, how long can it take to
>determine what you want to read and don't?

I'm reminded of a class I took in college. The instructor assigned
us a 2-hour homework assignment for EVERY class. "Two hours is only
a tiny part of your day!"

Of course, I was taking five other classes, and what do you think
the instructors of those classes thought about the available time
for homework?

You presumably wouldn't like it if there were 100,000 posts per
day in r.a.i-f. So don't act like it's insane of me to draw a
line somewhere, even if it's not where you'd draw the line. [*]

I *liked* raif with 40 posts a day.

I don't like coming in and finding more than 200 posts after
a ~30 hour abscence during which I was ACTUALLY WRITING A GAME
for a fair part of the time, and spending two hours wading
through it when I could have been spending 1.5 hours of those
trying to finish my game. Oh, sure, I could kill threads
indiscriminately, but then why am I even subscribed?

SeanB
[*] What is it about Usenet that brings out this attitude? Every
time I've been in a group talking about reorging to split the
traffic, yahoos run around saying "but I want to read all this
material, so let's leave it as a single group". By this logic,
all of Usenet should be a single newsgroup.
