[Coco] Some List Oddities...

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

Andrew,

I manage the list.

As far as skipping days, I don't know. Could be low message volume on 
the holiday. There were no messages on 6/8 and 6/9, for example. Did you 
get a digest? On the other hand, there were many messages on 12/31/19 
and 1/1/20. The server is on Central Time, so that may affect digest 
dates. Sometimes digests seem short but may have contained messages that 
were longer before the HTML was stripped; I don't know. Both length of 
digest and frequency of automatic digests are taken into account as 
well.

Since all the messages are archived and available to subscribers to the 
list, I really don't pay much attention to the digest.

Here's a good summary of the Mailman options that are variously set:

<https://www.technology.pitt.edu/help-desk/how-to-documents/mailman-advanced-preferences-list-administrators>

Dennis




On 2020-06-17 03:15, Andrew wrote:
> I'd have to do a bit of research, but I honestly don't know who
> maintains or runs this list? I've been on it since 2004, and other
> than knowing "maltedmedia.com", I've never really looked into it
> further. My bad, I guess. So - hopefully someone knows the answers to
> some strange (or I think strange) things I've noticed.
> 
> So, since I joined this list (or close to it), I have kept a copy of
> almost every digest of emails to the list, all the way back to
> sometime in 2004, and I just threw them all into a folder in my mail
> client (thunderbird), and never gave it much thought, but recently I
> decided I had the time now (what with being unemployed, lockdown,
> virus, etc) to do a bit of organization.
> 
> So I decided to break each set down by year. What I have seen, and I
> am not sure why - is that when the volume number rolls over, sometime
> near the end of the year (and I haven't looked closely in the middle
> of a single year), it will skip a number! Has anyone noticed this?
> 
> So for instance - in 2019, the last two digests I have for 12/31/2019
> are labeled:
> 
> Coco Digest, Vol 209, Issue 46
> Coco Digest, Vol 211, Issue 1
> 
> As far as I can tell - this kind of thing happens at the end of each
> year; sometimes the skip is on the same day (12/31) - sometimes - like
> 2018:
> 
> Coco Digest, Vol 196, Issue 51 (sent out on 12/30/2018)
> Coco Digest, Vol 198, Issue 1 (sent out on 12/31/2018)
> 
> For 2017, the skip happened on 12/31 - from Vol 183 to 185.
> 
> It seems to happen every year - although it didn't happen in 2013!
> 
> Coco Digest, Vol 131, Issue 69 (sent 12/31/2013)
> Coco Digest, Vol 131, Issue 68 (sent 12/31/2013)
> 
> But 2014 started with it skipped:
> 
> Coco Digest, Vol 133, Issue 1 (sent 1/1/2014)
> 
> Ok enough of that - I just find that weird that it is happening, and
> why? But another thing I have seen that I find odd:
> 
> Why do multiple digests get sent out per day. Sometimes there's only
> one digest, other times there could be 5 or more?
> 
> There doesn't seem to be a message queue count that remains steady
> (that is, each digest isn't exactly, say 10 or 15 messages each) -
> that seems random. Nor does it seem like the digest is sent out at a
> particular time periods per day (sometimes they seem close - but not
> close enough to say definitively that there is a pattern).
> 
> So what triggers the system to say "send out a digest"?
> 
> I'd personally think you should only get one digest a day, with
> however many messages were there for that day - or maybe 2 or 3 times
> a day? But again, just something curious I am witnessing.
> 
> Maybe there's a pattern here, and due to various system lags, enough
> time elapses between sends that it only appears somewhat random on the
> email timestamps, but it isn't?
> 
> Well - anyhow - I thought maybe someone out there might have an
> explanation, or at least might find this information interesting or
> amusing. It certainly amuses me as I re-organize these 20k+ or so
> email digests I've amassed!
> 
> --
> Andrew L. Ayers
> Glendale, Arizona
> phoenixgarage.org
> github.com/andrew-ayers