Hello All!

As promised I have finished auditting the backbone echoes, I will hatch out new
files either today or tomorrow.

There are 3 backbone files of interest.

BACKBONE.NA - List of currently active echoes in distribution.

BACKBONE.NO - List of inactive echoes in distribution as of last audit (07/08)

BACKBONE.DST - List of dead echoes no longer in distribution

Starting with BACKBONE.NO, which had 40 echoes listed within it, I discovered that 9 echoes revived themselves over the past year and show recent activity, these echoes will be restored to BACKBONE.NA. However 31 echoes showed no activity and these will drop to BACKBONE.DST and be removed from distribution.

Next I took a look at the echoes contained within BACKBONE.NA, this file currently has 220 echoes listed within it, of those 220, 31 echoes showed no activity over the past year or no meaningful activity beyond spam or knock knock messages since mid to late 2008. These 31 echoes will drop into BACKBONE.NO but will remain in distribution. BACKBONE.NA has a net loss of 22 echoes.

How I arrived at my numbers:

I do not have my tosser purge out old messages until they reach 365 days of age. Therefore I simply enabled my reader to view all echo areas to check message counts and look for age of last message or quality of all messages, I scrutinized some echo areas if they had 20 or less messages in them, which is pretty pathetic for a years time. Some of these had recent activity in them, so
I spared them from the axe, others had SPAM or its last message was in 2008. Some only had a monthly moderator rule posting, those with only a moderator rule posting were spared if the postings continued on into 2009.

It is not the forever end for echoes that get moved to the NO or DST files, if a echo gets into the NO file, the moderator can request it be placed back into the NA file, if they can drum up activity, else the activity gets reviewed again at the next audit, such is the case with the 9 echoes being returned on their own to the NA file. Echoes that fell out of distribution into the DST file can be returned to the NA file and into distribution, using the same procedures to request new echoes.

**WORTHY OF NOTE**

Last year at this time I promised to do another audit in January 2009, I did not, therefore it is likely this will be a yearly thing. If an echo cannot stay
viable over the course of a year, it has no business as a backbone offerring for sysops, new ones at that, trying to populate a message base with users.

==
Ross
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