8 Dec
2013
8 Dec
'13
8:28 a.m.
Bill: Thanks, but I'm looking for something worldwide.
Jean: A survey site is never going to be even remotely correct. People are
too busy to bother entering data more than they have to. I was hoping for a
method that uses known good data.
Marius: Thanks, but like my comment to Jean, that site is never going to be
correct. For example, I have run 6 BBSs for several years now and I didn't
even know about the site. And currently it lists only 7 gateways in the
United States. We have more than that just in our one county in California.
Not very useful.
For AMPRnet: What do you all think of the following logic?
1) Take the number of gateways listed in the portal.
2) Multiply by some factor to account for dead entries. This factor would
be less than 1. But it's probably not much less than 1 since we just went
through the transition to the portal and that must have cleaned out lots of
dead stuff, right? So, maybe 90% are good, or a factor of 0.9?
3) Multiply by another factor representing the number of BBSs per gateway.
This factor is greater than 1. But I think maybe it's not much greater than
one. For example, we used to have 4 BBSs behind one gateway. But in order
to gateway inbound e-mail without violating FCC Part 97 (discussed here long
ago), we added Internet connections at each site. Once we had Internet at
each site, we made each machine its own gateway. So I'm thinking the factor
is really close to 1, maybe 1.1.
4) Given both factors, I conclude that a reasonable estimate of the number
of BBSs reachable via AMPRnet is approximately equal to the number of
gateways in the portal.
Thoughts?
For the BBS Network:
I still don't have a clue as to how to estimate this.
Michael
N6MEF