Articles

• Keeping Echomail in perspective
• Ukraine CoModerator disconnects Moderator

Keeping Echomail in perspective
* By Joe Jared (1:103/301)
joejared@osirusoft.com

In order to understand the failure of echomail we must also look at the success of Usenet newsgroups. Our audience of 10 years ago has gone to newsgroups, and fidonet's survival is dependent on finding new ways of doing things.

A few statistics about the delivery of echomail. Between a few of the major distribution systems there are close to 800 echoes, roughly speaking. All totaled, about 3 megabytes of uncompressed mail flow through the backbone. Of these echoes, close to 200 of these echoes have had zero traffic in the past 30 days, and some have had no traffic in months. In my own logs, the following are the top 10 areas:

                               EchoMail Traffic
                               ================
                       Period: 1999-10-26 to 1999-11-21

AREA NAME                  TOTAL AVERAGE   TRAFFIC
REC.ARTS.COMICS.STRIPS      1958      72     2.37% !
POLITICS                    2162      80     2.62%
REC.AQUARIA.MARINE.REEFS    2207      81     2.68% !
HOLYSMOKE                   2339      86     2.84%
REC.AUTOS.TECH              2779     102     3.37% !
COMP.DCOM.XDSL              2922     108     3.54% !
COMP.LANG.C                 3541     131     4.29% !
REC.RADIO.CB                3919     145     4.75% !
REC.MOTORCYCLES             5639     208     6.84% !
REC.AUTOS.SPORT.NASCAR      6020     222     7.30% !

Note that there is no central theme to the above list, except that political and religious discussions were the only things that were able to make it into the top 10 areas. Looking at my nightly logs from my own news server confirms that the top listed gated newsgroups are also reflected in the list. There is no bias, and occasional posts in 1backbone also reflect this fact.

Excluding newsgroups, for the usenet impaired, and simply going with echoes, the "winners" last month in volume were...

Z1_BACKBONE                  585      21     0.71%
WIN95                        642      23     0.78%
ABORTION                     655      24     0.79%
FILK                         821      30     1.00%
MEMORIES                     825      30     1.00%
Z1C                          853      31     1.03%
ECHOLIST                     876      32     1.06%
FN_SYSOP                     941      34     1.14%
OS2                         1054      39     1.28%
COOKING                     1250      46     1.52%
LINUX                       1312      48     1.59%
FUNNY                       1451      53     1.76%
POLITICS                    2162      80     2.62%
HOLYSMOKE                   2339      86     2.84%

Given the above statistics, I personally am left to wonder what would happen if we collectively spent as much energy improving fidonet as we did fighting with each other. If something isn't done to reduce or eliminate unnecessary control and bickering, we will likely become a network of administrators, with nothing to administer. As we are now, we're truely unimportant in the big scheme of mail movers, excluding the fact that this is just a hobby.

In our prime, it wasn't uncommon to see 10000+ messages per day. We've shrunk, and yet Usenet distribution has increased to well over 20GB/day and when including binaries, over 60GB+/day.

In one area, I see our network becoming more anarchistic each day, which contrary to the stigma of the word, is a good thing. When people get truely sick of the bickering and groping for power, alternatives are available. The fidonet via internet list is primarily intended to provide these alternatives, and one I have found to work well for many. The war isn't over mind you, as suspicions of Jim Balcom's known Z1B bias becomes more visible. What neither Jim, the NAB, nor the Z1B appear to realize is that none of them individually are all that important. The ONLY important thing about echomail is that it gets distributed efficiently, and with few incidents. The personalities behind the tossers don't mean squat to downlink systems, except when they find a message from one of the personalities.

Ukraine CoModerator disconnects Moderator

FidoNews is supposed to be a newsletter of the whole Fido, but it looks like it's only American. So... Here's a short article on current evevts in 2:463.

Comod Disconnects Mod For Unwarranted Moderation.

Ruslan Kondratskiy, the comoderator of KIEV.TALKS, got his power together with another comod Al Yatsenko, and the moderator Juliy Chirkov on June'99 election. In some months, Juliy Chirkov had to quit Fido and appointed Al Yatsenko a temporary moderator. Ruslan agreed with the fact of the appointment, but doubted Al's full power. Still the echo lived its life, Ruslan put moderatorials, Al just supervised a bit. But a lot of people started complaining on Ruslan's activity to NE463C, because Comod started punishing for "numerous crossposts" or "non-permitted forward". NE463C promised to start new elections. Meanwhile, Al, the officially appointed "temporary moderator", published a moderatorial letter, proclaiming amnesty for all, punished by Ruslan. Then the Comod... put moderatorial [!] (disconnection) to Al for "unwarranted moderation". The Mod answered by putting [!] to Ruslan. Echo couldn't stop laughing. The conflict was solved by Vadim Serkov, the NE463C, who took KIEV.TALKS under his personal control till the elections.

Andrei Besedin with best wishes from Kiev, Ukraine.