Bad News/Good News

[Julian Humphries]

Out of curiosity as to the effect of the recent discussions on
this listserv about the mission of this discussion group and what
people would like to see discussed, I did a quick and dirty analysis
of the membership changes over the past 3 weeks (March 15 - April 3).

In essence, people have be leaving in what seem to be record
numbers.  Approximately 75 people have canceled their "subscription"
during that period.  Now the good news is that we added 63 or 64 (one
new person is a "concealed" subscriber, whatever that is).  A few of
these end up being changes of address (me for example), but if like
me you can't figure out how to delete an old address, the number of
"real" new people is actually lower.

Unfortunately, I don't have historical figures on Taxacom membership
so I can't say if this is an abnormal number or not, but from the
large number of unsubscribe messages appearing in the list itself, I
suspect that this number of cancellations doesn't occur often.

Even with no context, I find both numbers fascinating.  We probably
all have suspicions about why that many people left, but it also
seems like a large number of new subscribers too.  Do they hear about
Taxacom from cross-postings, paper journals, colleagues???

I am not trying to start a new thread on this subject and *don't*
welcome followup email unless someone is volunteering to conduct
an informal survey of new members (Rauch, you have a lot of spare time,
right?).   Just food for thought.


Julian Humphries                          Email: jmh3 at cornell.edu
The MUSE Project, Cornell University
83 Brown Road, Building 3
Ithaca, NY  14850  USA
Voice: 607-257-8143                       Fax:   607-257-8109
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