compiled by Simon Kershaw
These web pages provide some statistics about the Anglican internet mailing list.
I joined this list in July 1993. At that time the list was called the Episcopal mailing list and its address was anglican@american.edu. By Summer 1994 the list had become the Anglican mailing list, and a new list episcopal@indigo.mese.com (?, subsequently episcopal@dragon.com) had been spun off to carry various frequent posts, including the daily office Oremus (created especially for members of this list to pray together each day, but now with a life of its own at http://oremus.org), James Kiefer's BIO and KAL posts (originally posted to the newsgroup soc.religion.christian I think, then cross-posted to anglican, now with a life of their own at http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/JEK/ and the press releases of the Episcopal News Service (ENS) and the Anglican Communion News Service (ACNS), each of which now also have their own email lists and web sites http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/ens/ and http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/ respectively.
In October 1993 I began to record the number of posts made to the list each month, and the number of members of the list. The listserv software at american.edu made it relatively easy to do this, since a single post could retrieve a list of members and a list of all the posts in a given period. A change in the listserv software to run on Unix rather than MVS, removed this feature in October 1994, and so in February 1995 I began to log every post I received from the list, or rather I added a mail filter to do this for me, and to generate the statistics post at the end of each month. For every post that I received from the list, the filter writes the name of the sender to one log (the 'from log'), and the subject of the post to another log (the 'subject log'). New log files are automatically started each month, based on the time the message arrives at my mail filters (not the time at which the message is sent).
The list moved from anglican@american.edu to anglican@StSams.org (subsequently anglican@list.StSams.org) somewhere around December 1997/January 1998.
For a long time I recorded list membership, and Brian Reid also frequently posted a 'roster' of members. Tracking the changes in membership became too great a task and neither of us keeps these numbers now.
For a time I also posted monthly lists of the number of posts made to each thread, derived from the subject lines of posts. Unlike the number of posters, this information was substantially massaged by hand to correct the strange things that happen to subject lines (truncation, captialization changes, retyping and mistyping, etc). This became to great a task and I stopped making these posts, but I still collect the data and it is presented here.
Alan Jackson has also posted different statistics each month, principally showing the ratio of quoted material to original material.
This page contains links to the archive of all the monthly statistics posts that I have kept, or in a few cases, recreated. It also contains all the base log files used since February 1995 to determine the statistics posts -- that is a list for each month of the pster of each message I received, and a separate list of th subject lines of each message I received. It also includes copies of various extra posts of a statistical nature I have made over the years to the list. On each occasion the reason for making these posts has been because of the amount of mail being posted to the list. The creation of these web pages is occasioned by the same circumstances!
The following list contains links for each month to the statistical post made to the Anglican list 'stat', and the underlying from log 'flog' and subject log 'slog'.
Simon Kershaw <simon@kershaw.org.uk>
7 February, 2000.