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Ärende: FidoNews 31:47 [02/08]: Editorial
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                            EDITORIAL
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           The NETSTATS program

   In the late 1980s Justin Marquez of 1:106/100 wrote a program that
analysed the nodelist and created quite a lot of statistics. It was
written in TurboPascal 5 and an unknown number of versions existed
before the final release to the world, v2.0. It was released at July
13, 1989.

   In May 28, 2001 the former Fidonews editor, Frank Vest, silently
published the first output from the program, and since then it's been
a standing article, now in the Special Interest column.

   Now, as we all know, a lot have happened to Fidonet since 1989, the
output from the program has become more and more obsolete -- and some-
times even erroneous, something that has been pointed out to me
several times, and I've tried to correct it as the reports have been
made.

   But now I've made a long overdue update of the program. Among other
things I've replaced the File Freq Flags list (that probably wasn't
very accurate anyway) with an IP Flags list. Feel free to check it out
and report anything that you think is wrong with it to me, please.

   Futhermore, if you have ideas about what other statistics you'd
like to see, I'm open for suggestions. The various modem flags, for
instance, isn't all that interesting any more, are they?

       -  =  o  =  0  =  o  =  -

   At the same time I discovered that the DAT file that the program
also writes to as some kind of log file, was complete from September
12, 1997. Yes, that's right, full nodelist statistics for more than 17
years! Well, there may be a couple of weeks missing (because the diff
did not arrive properly) and there may be a couple of dups caused by
me testing a new version, but all in all it should be a goldmine for
all you statistics fans out there.

   This file, a comma delimited text file, the first line with a short
description of each column, can now be downloaded as:

   http://felten.yi.org/files/BBS/NETS_DAT.ZIP

   If there's a big enough interest I might update this file each week
after the latest run of NETSTATS.

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