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From: keesan@bbncca.ARPA (Morris M. Keesan)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm
Subject: Re: What's being read?
Message-ID: <1312@bbncca.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 8-Feb-85 09:23:33 EST
Article-I.D.: bbncca.1312
Posted: Fri Feb  8 09:23:33 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Feb-85 08:15:37 EST
References: <426@grendel.UUCP>
Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 24

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>> Somewhere, I saw a question asking whether it was possible to determine what
>> news on a site is actually being read. 
>
>Fred Blonder at umcp-cs wrote s subscriber shell -- reports how many
>subscribers each news group has by looking at everyone's .newsrc file.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work if you have any users like me.  I don't have
a ".newsrc" file.  I split my news reading into "chunks" with separate NEWSRC
files, and have a shell script which invokes readnews with $NEWSRC set to the
right thing:

NEWSRC=$HOME/."$0"rc readnews $@

Actually more complicated then this, but this is the gist of it.  I then type
"technews" to read the technical newsgroups listed in "$HOME/.technewsrc", for
example.  Before trusting the results of the script that reports what's in
everybody's .newsrc file, you might want to post something to "general"
(NOT net.general!!!) asking if any of your users are using the $NEWSRC feature.
-- 
			    Morris M. Keesan
			    {decvax,linus,ihnp4,wivax,wjh12,ima}!bbncca!keesan
			    keesan @ BBN-UNIX.ARPA