SEELANGS Administrivia - How many subscribers are there?

[Alex Rudd]

Dear SEELangers,

Earlier today one of you sent me the following inquiry.  Believing the
answer might be of interest to several of you, if not many of you, I
have decided to reply on the list.  Here you go:

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 3:06 AM, (name redacted)
<to.protect at the.innocent.com> wrote:
> I just have a simple query that many of us have been wondering about (I've
> asked around and nobody knows, though there is much curiosity):
> Roughly how many people subscribe to SEELANGS at this point? And how many
> are located in the U.S./Canada vs. other parts of the world?

It is very easy to determine how many people are subscribed to
SEELANGS at this point, or at any time for that matter.  LISTSERV is
just a computer program, and it is not difficult for a computer
program to count the number of subscribers.

What is more difficult for LISTSERV to do is to determine exactly
where all the subscribers are located in the world.  There is no fancy
algorithm that processes and parses every message posted to the list
to determine whether the poster has indicated his or her location in a
signature block.  Plus, not every subscriber has posted to the list.
Instead, the way LISTSERV tries to determine everyone's location is by
examining the top level domain names ("TLDs").

The top level domain name in an e-mail address is the very last part,
the thing that comes right after the last dot.  TLDs basically come in
two varieties: some are supposed to be descriptive of the type of
services found there (e.g., .com (commercial), .net (network
providers), .org (non-profit organizations), although the lines there
have been very blurred over the years), and some TLDs are actually
two-letter codes established by the International Organization for
Standardization that identify countries of origin (e.g., .ru = Russian
Federation, .ch = Switzerland, .pa = Panama).

So if a subscriber's e-mail address ends in .ch, there is an extremely
good chance that that person is located in Switzerland.  On the other
hand, there are many Russian-speakers not actually located in Russia
who have signed up for a free e-mail address on mail.ru or yandex.ru,
so perhaps a .ru TLD is not as reliable an indicator as is .ch.
Similarly, many people in Russia and elsewhere are using addresses
such as gmail.com or yahoo.com, and all of those are considered to be
located in the United States.  We even have three people subscribed
from .su addresses and obviously there is no longer a corresponding
country for that one (Soviet Union).

Compounding (and confounding) the issue further, some people use
certain TLDs just because they like the way they look.  With apologies
for using one of you as a real-world example of this, there is one
person subscribed from an .as address (American Samoa), and you might
easily conclude without further information that this person is
located in American Samoa.  In fact, this person's surname is Thomas
and his e-mail address ends in @thom.as (i.e., it's a novelty TLD and
we have no idea where he's really located).

All of that explanation is merely one big caveat for the answer to the
question posed.  To determine how many people are subscribed to this
list, and to get a rough idea of where they're located, compose a
brand new e-mail message, addressing it to:

LISTSERV at BAMA.UA.EDU

Put anything (or nothing) in the Subject: line, and in the message
body put only the following single line of text (which might be most
easily copied and pasted):

REVIEW SEELANGS COUNTRY SHORT NOHEADER

And send the message.  In reply, LISTSERV will e-mail you the total
number, with a breakdown by "country," which is really just a
breakdown by TLD, for what that's worth.

A couple of notes: 1) This same command, or any LISTSERV command, can
also be sent using the Web interface, for those people who like to use
that instead; and 2) this same command will also work on any LISTSERV
list to which you might be subscribed.  Just substitute the name of
that list for SEELANGS in the command and send it to the appropriate
LISTSERV server (and if you're not sure what that is, try sending it
to LISTSERV at LISTSERV.EDU and it should get forwarded to the right
one).

Finally, to save some of you the trouble of sending a LISTSERV command
right now, we currently have just over 2,500 people subscribed to the
SEELANGS list.  I don't always pay attention to how many subscribers
there are, but I can tell you this: when I took over as list owner in
early 1993, there were about 300 subscribers.  In early 2000, there
were just over 900.  Thanks to all of you for making it a discussion
list worth joining, and one on which most people seem to think it's
worth remaining.

Regards,

- Alex, list owner of SEELANGS
--
Alex Rudd
List owner e-mail: seelangs-request at bama.ua.edu
Personal e-mail: Alex.Rudd at gmail.com
http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
Any opinion expressed above is not necessarily shared by my employers.

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