GroupSTAT

GroupSTAT - generates statistics from a local Usenet news spool
Current Version: 0.12.1 (beta-quality, mostly stable :-)

Changes in 0.12.1

Very very small bugfix
Fixed a bug which would cause GroupSTAT to fail whenever you selected more than one group. This is NOT related to News::Scan.

Motivations

Recently, I seem to have become the unofficial stats maintainer for rec.arts.drwho. The program that I have been using to generate these stats, StatNews, was inadequate for the job. I thought about making a few alterations to it and sending a patch to the maintainer (Davide Salvetti), but after looking over the source code to StatNews, I decided that it would be easier to start over and do a complete re-write, using StatNews's source as a cheat-sheet for certain aspects of the project.

So, I set about writing this new program. I did a little research, and found the News::Scan Perl module (available on CPAN or from the author's website. The News::Scan module allowed me to write a program to get the stats without having to actually look at any news articles. This made my job a lot easier.

Credits

I would like to thank these people for their help, support, and code:

Requirements

First of all, this program requires a semi-recent version of Perl. See the Portability section for information about platform compatability.

It also requires that your keep all of your news articles in separate text files in a directory on the computer you wish to run GroupSTAT on. If that computer does not have a news server running on it, you will probably have to use the getnews program (included). Just run getnews for a list of options.

GroupSTAT also requires the following non-standard Perl modules:

Availability and Installation

GroupSTAT is free software, and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. (See the source for details.) However, there is no warranty, so if it, say, causes your monitor to explode and set fire to your home town, it's Not My Fault.

There is no installation procedure at this time. Copy the groupstat file into a suitable directory (such as /usr/local/bin or ~/bin and run it from there. Please see the README file for options and other helpful information.

Portability

I have tried to make GroupSTAT as portable as possible. However, please remember that it has been (for the most part) designed and tested under Debian GNU/Linux woody, and may not work on other platforms. This should be considered a bug; if you have problems getting it to work on your flavor of Unix, please tell me.

Windows Users Please Note!

The state of GroupSTAT's support for Win32 platforms should be considered alpha. Some things may be difficult to set up, or may not work at all. Use with caution.

Although GroupSTAT should be run from the DOS prompt, it must be run from inside Windows. This is because GroupSTAT uses long file names for both input and output. IT WILL NOT RUN PROPERLY UNDER PLAIN DOS.

Sample Output

You can find all of the stats generated by GroupSTAT so far in the output/ directory of this site.

Future of GroupSTAT

Future versions of GroupSTAT will be more useful to people besides me. Check out the current TODO and BUGS lists for my future plans. Feel free to help out with the development of GroupSTAT! :-)

The Past of GroupSTAT

Here is where the older versions of GroupSTAT are stashed away. These are probably only useful with people with special needs or developers wondering, "where did it all go wrong?". :-) See the change log for a history of this program's development.