response 48 of 87:

Mar 15 00:20 UTC 2018

There have been suggestions for backtalk/frontalk before, but it seems
it's such old code that no one wants to really investigate it.  As Perl
has changed versions and the OS has changed around it, it gets harder to
maintain.  

But, if we could fix it, that would be great. The trouble is, the
original authors of the code are no longer around that we can find, so
to dig into it would take a lot of time for someone to fix it (someone
familiar with Perl coding amongst other things).

We used to have more people reading BBS on the web than at the command
line (though that was somewhat hard to prove).  The nice thing about
reading on the web is cellphones and tablets could get involved too.

One suggestion for bbs was to allow editing of responses since we
occasionally make mistakes in our responses.  That turned into a
censorship debate and was turned down.  If you want to correct a
response, you need to delete it and re-enter it.  Therefore, as you can
see making progress is rather difficult unless everyone agrees (which is
rarely the case).

Right now, if you can get our web-based command line going you can use
the bbs command and that's about as far as we can go right now with
web-based conferencing unless you can get the current web bbs working or
consider other options.

We could install a free web-based forum system on the Grex web site but
that would take someone to not only install it, but set it up correctly,
and maintain it (including moderation, most likely, as abhorrent as that
is to Grex users--but like a conference fair witness).  It's not clear
if anyone has time for that, but it is one way to modernize Grex a bit.
It would likely diverge from the way bbs saves its data, so might split
the users (but if there are so few, does it matter?).

We have an item in Agoras past regarding how to improve and keep Grex
going (Grex Town Hall: How do we Move Forward).  It initially had a
lot of responses, but not so much any more.  In fact, we have not
"rolled" the Agora conference system for over a year now.  It used to
be set up fresh (with popular on-going items linked from the previous
agora conference). Again it takes someone to do it and do it correctly.
Waiting for a consensus, as Dan implies above, is partly to blame for
this situation.  The other is the perpetual lack of staff time.

I've been snowed under at work, too so it's been difficult to
concentrate on much more.