Dear GAP forum,
I thought it might be useful to get some statistics about the postings
to the GAP forum. Eamonn O'Brien asks if the GAP forum should be split
into two forums. I went through all the postings to the GAP forum that
were sent since the beginning of this year and put them into the two
categories that Eamonn suggests.

I counted a total of 127 postings (discarding meaningless postings
like the error messages about someone's full hard disk, etc.). 72
postings would qualify for the first category (mathematical issues,
etc.) of postings, 55 for the second category (implementation issues,
etc.).

There were 70 postings before GAP 3.2 was released. 45 of those would
go into the first category and only 25 into the second.

Since the release of GAP 3.2 there were 57 postings, 27 of which
belong to the first category and 30 to the second category.

The distribution of postings before and after the release of GAP 3.2
is interesting. I think that what we are seeing here is an increase
of postings of the second category because there was a new release of
GAP and people have to sort out the various installation problems.
Also, it is after a new release has become available that people are
interested in performance questions and compare the old to the new
release. Therefore, I expect that the number of postings of the
second category will decrease during the next weeks.

My opinion is that the volume of the GAP-forum is acceptable and that
there is no need to split the forum. Furthermore, I usually find it
easy to recognize `uninteresting' messages from the subject line. If
people continue to use keywords (like permutation group problem,
performance, compiling, DOS, etc.) as part of their subject that
indicate the nature of their posting, there should not be a problem in
sifting out those messages which deal with issues of the first
category.

Regards, Werner Nickel.
----------------------------/|-|--|-|--|------Werner-Nickel-------------------
werner@pell.anu.edu.au     /_| |\ | |  |      Mathematics Research Section
--------------------------/--|-|-\|-|_/|------Australian-National-University--