[Dxspider-support] Where have all the talk and announcement messages gone?

[djk]

Is it just me or does no-one much bother announcing things or use talk 
messages anymore? Come to that, what about bulletins and personal messages?

I ask because most of the (non-WPX) internode traffic is there to keep 
track of who is connected to which node to facilitate stuff like talk 
and personal message routing. We could get rid of all the "real-time" 
add/delete user to node messages and, with minimum software changes on 
my part, still get this stuff through in a timely and reasonably 
efficient manner. It would noticeably reduce the inter node bandwidth 
requirements.

Does anyone really care anymore as who is connected where? When was the 
last time anyone a) did a sh/c and b) actually looked carefully at the 
output?

Dirk G1TLH