Re: A few NG related questions

Comments embedded...

Hi John, you said...
> Hi, a few questions...
>
> * Are these ORACLE news groups moderated? I was under the impression
> that they are, but I am beginning to think I was wrong.

They are not officially moderated, though some might answer a question or two as if they were the moderator. <g> They are not like the microsoft.whatever NGs, which are monitored by, but not moderated by, Microsoft.

> * I saw posting statistics posted from time to time. How are these
> ststs generated? Is ORACLE Corp. somehow involved?

One of the members of these NGs (the comp.databases.oracle... set) wrote a Perl program to extract those statistics.

> * For people who have been in these NGs for a while, how has the
> traffic to these NGs changed over the years? I heard somebody say the
> traffic used to be much busier.

Been here a while. Haven't noticed any major increase or decrease in the traffic. But I'm not sure what conclusions you can draw based only on the amount of traffic in a NG. The statistics you mentioned above show that sometimes some troll will anger a bunch of people and traffic will go up dramatically for a while. I don't think anyone would claim that the increase reflects an increase in quality.

> * For people who also visit the SQL server NGs, how do you compare the
> traffic, over the years? I was surprised to know there were many more
> SQL server related NGs than ORACLE, and I saw a lot of traffic over
> there.

Isn't that kinda like that old cliche about comparing apples and oranges? I don't monitor the SQL Server NGs, but I do follow several other MS NGs. Had to drop out of the WinXP NG because I didn't want to spend all day looking thru a bunch of junk (can't exactly call it spam, since a lot of people were genuinely looking for help). I think the purpose of a NG is to share knowledge. The Oracle NGs do that. And I don't need to compare apples and oranges to come to that conclusion.

>
>
> John
>

-- 
[:%s/Karsten Farrell/Oracle DBA/g]