Note A:
Now that Deja no longer exists and Google has not yet provided a way to search Usenet by Months, it's not possible to provide Monthly Totals in these columns.  This situation will be monitored as time goes by.

Note B:
Deja.com said it was unable to find any postings at all to AUE for May, June, and October 1996. It's hard to believe that there really were none, so it's assumed these are defects in the Deja.com database.

Note C:
The counts in my archives for February 1996 are for Only about the last half of the Month.

Note D:

Prior to May 2003, a policy of "warts and all" was followed in assembling the Totals for the tables in this file.  That is, spam was included in the Totals the same as legitimate postings.  This seemed acceptable since the amount of spam has been quite small compared to the volume of legitimate postings.  During May, there has been a great increase in the amount of spam Posted to AUE, so steps were taken to exclude the biggest part of that spam from the Totals.  This policy will continue from now on.

Note that in order to compare numbers for Deja.com and those for my archives, you need to keep in mind which columns include crosspostings and which do not. For example, in the 1999 data for my archives a proper comparison would be between the Deja.com 'AUE' column and the sum of the 'AUE' and 'Both' columns for my archives.

The differences in number of postings to AUE at Deja.com and in my archives show a consistent pattern. With few exceptions, the numbers in my archives are a few percent higher than those for Deja.com. This is due in part to the fact that postings with 'X_no_archive=Yes' set will appear in my archives but not at Deja.com. It's also possible that Deja.com has deleted some postings that were clearly spam, while my archives have everything I downloaded, spam and all.

The postings in my archives represent for the most part those downloaded at my site. There have been a few times when I have been away from home for a period of time a little longer than the retention period of my ISP, and in those cases I've obtained postings from the databases of other AUE followers.

Under 'Number of postings in my archives':

• 'Both' means that each posting counted had both 'alt.usage.english' and 'alt.english.usage' in the 'Newsgroups: ' line.



• 'AEU' means that each posting counted had 'alt.english.usage' in the 'Newsgroups: ' line, but not 'alt.usage.english'. This category appears Only after the beginning of 1999, because I wasn't downloading postings from alt.english.usage before that time.



• 'AUE' means that each posting counted had 'alt.usage.english' in the 'Newsgroups: ' line, but not 'alt.english.usage'.



• Starting with 2002, a "+Both" column has been added under each of 'AEU' and 'AUE'.   This column has the number Posted to the group plus the number Posted to both.  That is, it's the Total number Posted to the group including crossposts to the other principal group.



• 'Neither' means that each posting counted had neither 'alt.usage.english' nor 'alt.english.usage' in the 'Newsgroups: ' line. Presumably these are all postings that were Posted to uk.culture.language.english and not crossPosted to AUE or AEU.

• Postings under 'AUE' may or may not have been crossPosted to AEU.



• Postings under 'AEU' may or may not have been crossPosted to AUE,