I'm going to be unsubscribing briefly due to a short trip I'll be going on
and preparations for school - whether I'll resubscribe I don't know yet.
Depends on whether I end up missing the fanfic and C&C more than I'm
relieved to be rid of the spam, I guess.  (At the very least, I'll
probably resubscribe when one of my forthcoming fanfics is complete enough
that I'm ready for C&C on it...) But since July 6, I've been keeping track
of the signal-to-noise ratio here, and I thought I'd just post what I had
before it got completely out of date.  The categories I've been using are:

Fanfic.  Obvious.

Topical.  Primarily C&C, but also some meta discussions of how the list
should run, the nature of C&C, a few things on copyright, etc.

Borderline.  Between Topical and Noise - not really all that topical any
more, but still vaguely so, so much that I can't really call it noise.
Also, most Noise posts that have an ObC&C at the end.

Noise.  Spam, of course, but also misdirected unsubscribe requests,
requests for missing parts of stories (these really ought to go to the
authors, if you have their email addresses), and so on.

(These categories are somewhat subjective, I'll admit, but I tried to be
as fair as possible in assigning posts a category.  Also, I'm only human -
the numbers might be off a bit in each category, but not significantly, I
hope.)

And the results?

>From July 6 to August 29, there were 3859 posts:

452 Fanfic posts
900 Topical posts
100 Borderline posts
2407 Noise posts

Splitting Borderline posts evenly between Signal (Fanfic+Topical) and
Noise, about 64%, or just under two-thirds, of the list traffic was Noise.
Of course, it fluctuated greatly with time - sometimes there were
stretches of few Noise posts, other times stretches of huge numbers of
them.

Just some fuel for the ongoing debate of relevancy vs. noise.

--
Scott Johnson |
zagyg@io.com  |           This space intentionally left blank.