Friday  6 September 2024

Number of Gopher users (re: Ralf Wause)
=======================================
Ralf wrote in his phlog post [1] that he was wondering how many
regular users Gopher does get. With this, he means the number
of people browser the Gopher sphere.

In the past, I asked my self a similar question, about the
number of Gopher servers [2]. I came to the surprising
estimate of about 320 servers world wide.

Counting the visitors
---------------------
Triggered by the phlog post of Ralf, I started to look for
the logs of my Gopher server. I never look into these, so
first I had to see if there are indeed any logs.

It turns out Gophernicus logs into /var/log/daemon.

Then I ran this small query:

  grep gophernicus daemon | sed "s/^.*from //" | sort | uniq | wc -l

This gives an idea of the number of unique ip-addresses.

The answer is ... 30

Not even 42.

To get an idea of the period:

  grep gophernicus daemon | head

shows that the logging started on September 4th, 21:00.
The last log was on September 6th, 10:00.
So our data comes from just a tad more than a single day.

I have been camping, so the last week didn't post anything new.
I guess the number of visitors might be higher in periods with
more active publishing.

I repeated the query on an older log:

  zgrep gophernicus daemon.3.gz | sed "s/^.*from //" | sort | uniq | wc -l

And the answer is: 286

That might be more representative.
The log period is July 15th 19:00 to July 29th 10:50.

The same query on daemon.2.gz resulted in 194 unique ip-addresses,
in the period July 28th 11:00 to August 9th 09:16.

So, I think it is sound to say that in periods with some active
posting, the number of unique visitors is somewhere around 200.

Not a real answer
-----------------
Of course, this only are the visitors/bots/aggregators that
are interested in my ramblings. Other Gopher burrows might
see much higher numbers.

But at least, we can say to Ralf, that the minimum number of
people/bots/aggregators that browse the Gopher sphere must be
286 :)

[1]: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/ralfwause/./phlog/040924.txt
[2]: gopher://box.matto.nl/0/the-gopher-universe-is-smol.txt


Last edited: $Date: 2024/09/06 08:35:40 $