Acbosgd.1842 net.general utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Thu Jan 14 11:19:05 1982 Re: How long? It depends on the newsgroup and where you are. If you are somewhere inside Bell Labs or on a key machine with a dialer (decvax, duke) it will probably get out to 70-80% of the net within a few hours. If not, you probably have to wait for an overnight poll, but it will get most places (>90%) overnight. There are some far reaches that won't get it for 2-3 days (more if something is down) and it may take another 2-3 days for a reply or followup to get back to you. The fa newsgroups are different. They are fed in a Berkeley which then waits for ihnss and decvax to poll. ihnss only polls once a day (in the early morning) - decvax calls often. So Bell Labs (which gets most stuff from ihnss) tends to have fa stuff each morning from the previous day, those getting news from duke or decvax get it randomly faster depending on when decvax happens to call ucbvax (usually several times a day). And of course there are the delays from the time the news shows up on a system to when any given person actually reads it - often once a day, but some people log in on neighboring machines to get news and don't get it that often. I have gotten replies to queries as much as 3 weeks later, not counting the famous unix-wizards drought where it took 2 months to reach the masses before it even got into USENET! But a rough rule of thumb is that by overnight, most of the net will have at least had the chance to read your article. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.