In the context of deciding how best to evolve/change the platform underlying Mozilla’s current discussion forums, the question arose as to what percentage of people use each of the 3 available access methods (email, NNTP, Google Groups). I did some research on this a while ago, although I can’t find it now, and fortunately was able to find my script again and re-run it. (Tip: if you need to download a newsgroup as an mbox file on Unix, use the nntp-pull program from the sinntp package.) Here are some statistics, from what I hope is a representative cross-section of groups which are currently active. The stats are for the (approx.) 1000 most recent messages in the group, or all of them if there are fewer than 1000.
mozilla.community.philippines
Total Web Mail News
Posters: 41 18 (43.90%) 20 (48.78%) 3 (7.32%)
Posts: 135 34 (25.19%) 96 (71.11%) 5 (3.70%)
mozilla.dev.planning
Total Web Mail News
Posters: 222 31 (13.96%) 128 (57.66%) 63 (28.38%)
Posts: 1001 72 (7.19%) 688 (68.73%) 241 (24.08%)
mozilla.dev.platform
Total Web Mail News
Posters: 215 51 (23.72%) 107 (49.77%) 57 (26.51%)
Posts: 999 147 (14.71%) 590 (59.06%) 262 (26.23%)
mozilla.dev.quality
Total Web Mail News
Posters: 207 79 (38.16%) 73 (35.27%) 55 (26.57%)
Posts: 871 144 (16.53%) 475 (54.54%) 252 (28.93%)
mozilla.dev.tech.layout
Total Web Mail News
Posters: 172 75 (43.60%) 45 (26.16%) 52 (30.23%)
Posts: 860 250 (29.07%) 193 (22.44%) 417 (48.49%)
mozilla.mozillians
Total Web Mail News
Posters: 171 32 (18.71%) 120 (70.18%) 19 (11.11%)
Posts: 887 187 (21.08%) 513 (57.84%) 187 (21.08%)
TOTAL of all the above:
Total Web Mail News
Posters: 853 274 (32.12%) 404 (47.36%) 175 (20.52%)
Posts: 4753 835 (17.57%) 2557 (53.80%) 1361 (28.63%)
Notes and observations:
- Each access method is used by a significant number of contributors.
- Mail is the most popular access method. The order of the other two depends on whether you count posts or posters.
- People using news have a higher rate of posts per poster, suggesting a deeper level of involvement. (That, of course, says nothing about the utility of each post.)
- People using the web have a lower rate of posts per poster, suggesting more casual involvement (which makes sense, as the web version has a low barrier to entry).
The web results could easily be negatively skewed by the problems we’ve had with Google Groups the last several months, too. Some people who would otherwise use the web interface might be intentionally be avoiding it because they know it’s been broken a lot.
In addition to what Dave said, the new GG interface uses email headers instead of newsgroup headers. For instance, in mozilla.mozillians, when a GG user replies to a message sent via the mailing list, the reply is sent to mozilla.mozillians@googlegroups.com and CCed to mozillians@lists.mozilla.org. The result is a double-post.
> the web version has a low barrier to entry
This is an important point, IMO. The web interface has a low barrier to entry but is correspondingly unpleasant to use extensively.
The nntp interface has the highest barrier to entry but allows the use of a real newsreader, which provides a number of very useful and otherwise unavailable features for managing individual messages, threads, groups, and even entire sets of groups. Just for example, the ability to kiboze is not available any other way.
So I would say that the web and nntp interfaces, provided they can be kept reasonably in sync, complement one another very nicely.
The mail interface is somewhere in between, depending on exactly how you use it. If you use it with a webmail account, it’s mostly similar to the web interface, with just a few extra features (depending on exactly which webmail service you use). With a good mailreader, it becomes much more feature-rich.
> Just for example, the ability to kiboze is not available any other way.
I just realized this is technically untrue. With the right software, it would be possible to kiboze mail groups. However, the barrier to entry would be much higher than for just using standard off-the-shelf solutions for kibozing usenet.
Possibly; although the biggest problem with GG has been connecting up new groups, rather than the working of existing ones. There was a problem with that for a bit, but it was a while ago.