NewsStats 0.1 (c) 2010 Thomas Hochstein NewsStats is a software package for gathering statistical data live from a Usenet feed and subsequent examination. This script package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. --------------------------------------------------------------------- What's that? There's a multitude of tools for the statistical examination of newsgroups: number of postings per month or per person, longest threads, and so on (see [German language] for an incomplete list). Most of them use a per- newsgroup approach while NewsStats is hierarchy oriented. NewsStats will accumulate data from a live INN feed, allowing you to process the saved information later on. Workflow NewsStats saves overview data and complete headers of (all) incoming postings to a (MySQL) database in real time. That raw data will be regularly - e.g. monthly - processed to a second set of database tables each dedicated to a certain statistical aspect, e.g. number of postings per group and month. Several kinds of reports can then be generated from those result tables. Prerequisites NewsStats is written in Perl (5.8.x and above) and makes use of a MySQL database, so you will need Perl, some modules, mysql and, of course, INN. * Perl 5.8.x with standard modules - Cwd - File::Basename - Sys::Syslog * Perl modules form CPAN - Config::Auto - Date::Format - DBI * mysql 5.0.x * working installation of INN Installation instructions See INSTALL. Getting Started 'feedlog.pl' will continuously feed raw data to your raw data table. See the feedlog.pl man page for more information. You can process that data via 'gatherstats.pl'; currently only the tabulation of postings per group and month is supported. More to come. See the gatherstats.pl man page for more information. Report generation is handled by specialised scripts for each report type. Currently only reports on the number of postings per group and month are supported; you can use 'groupstats.pl' for this. See the groupstats.pl man page for more information. Reporting Bugs You can report bugs or feature requests to the author using the bug tracker at . Please have a look at the TODO list before suggesting improvements. More Information This program is maintained using the Git version control system. You may clone to check out the current development tree or browse it on the web via . Related projects is a site were data gathered via NewsStats is used for a graphical presentation of activity in the de.* Usenet hierarchy over the years (since 1992). Author Thomas Hochstein