The Agora Dilemma

Jun 3 05:30 UTC 1995

This is sort of an item in agora, but I think it might serve a better
purpose being here.

There's a lot of talk about agora being so big and unwieldy that 
people don't get around to the other conferences.  It's also been
mentioned that new users might not even *know* there are other
conferences other than agora.

What I was wondering was:  Why is agora set up as a default conference?
Why is there a default conference at all?  

Why not set newusers up so they go into the bbs with the (no conf)
thing, and echo "Type help conf for a list of conferences to join"

It seems like that would be the ideal way to introduce new users
to all the conferences, rather than dumping them in the biggest one
we have.  A couple people I know started accounts here, got dumped
into agora, and were so overwhelmed they didn't even finish reading
agora, let alone look at other conferences.

Maybe it would be a little confusing to start out *not* in a conference,
but if the echo is set up right, it should be easy enough to figure
out (IMHO).

Just my 2 cents.

response 2 of 152:

Jun 3 16:19 UTC 1995

   There is an idea that Marcus has had for a while now, which might
work: have newuser go through the list of intrests that people give,
and look for keywords to build up an appropriate .cflist file.  For
example, food, cooking might add the kitchen conference into the
new persons .cflist, radio might go to the ham-radio conference,
politics for the world conference, and so on.  Technically, it would
not be that hard to do.  The upside of this would be that we'd place
maybe 50% of the new people into a conference that might interest
them.  The downside is that we'd have more beginner responses sprinkled
all across the conferences.

response 4 of 152:

Jun 4 22:08 UTC 1995

(Is someone going to link this to coop?)

Rane, FWs can't zap beginner responses (beginner *items*, yes).  Grex
very deliberately chose for Picospan to be configured to prevent
FWs from censoring responses, & I'd hate to see that change.  cfadms
(& people with root access) can if necessary do this in various
ways; other than Marc's recent & somewhat controversial expurgation
of one thing, I can only remember a couple of times when this was done
in places where I would see it.  One was a posted credit-card number
(or apparently so), and another was when someone started automatically
adding twit responses to *every item* (in many conferences, too, I think).

response 6 of 152:

Jun 5 06:33 UTC 1995

You mean, users would consider zapping q, ".", quit, and other futile
attempts to get out of the text collector, censorship? Boy, they must
really value open communication, if they do! 
  
But this makes me think of an idea which would help newusers greatly
with relatively little constraint on others: make entries such as
q, quit, ".", etc *all by themselves on a new line*, bring up a message
giving the proper way to quit the text collector, either to abandon or
post the response. A drawback might be when a user ends a sentence with
quit

response 8 of 152:

Jun 5 10:30 UTC 1995

Let me try again:  THERE IS NO WAY TO **LET** A FW KILL AN ITEM
CONSISTING OF (say)
     "."
     help
     exit
     bye
WITHOUT GIVING THE FW THE ABILITY TO CENSOR ON THE BASIS OF CONTENT.
Grex decided to forgo the latter, which entails forgoing the former.

If we could allow FWs to clean up newbie mistakes of that kind -
without allowing more serious censorship - that would be good.  But I
would hate to see us start drowning in arguments about whether
content-based censoring was appropriate.  And this would inevitably
happen.

response 10 of 152:

Jun 5 16:01 UTC 1995

If newuser is itself modified to inform and encourage about access
to all the cfs, it could offer a succession of choices (menus) for
looking at and getting information about cfs, and choosing them. The
new user would not even have to learn commands like "help conferences"
on their first login. 

response 12 of 152:

Jun 5 17:48 UTC 1995

Here's a couple of my own cents:

1) To decrease the number of "beginner" responses from cluttering the
system, you could make a new user get dropped into the test conference and
told that they should enter a response or two and an item as practice...

2) Although this is a kludge, you could generate mail with a polite
request to expurgate and scribble a nonsense response.  Notwithstanding that
this is likely beyond the capability of said novice user.

3) I like the idea of linking to topic-appropriate conferences for newusers.
I've been on this system about 9 months and still have no clue whatsoever
about the vast majority of conferences available.  Being linked to topics of
interest sounds very enticing.

response 14 of 152:

Jun 6 03:50 UTC 1995

        Agora? Interesting? Absolutely not! From my first time here, I 
found it ridiculous, boring, and above all, seemingly endless,
as the picospan prompt text tells you to type "r" to read, but DOES
not tell you how to STOP.
        It very nearly had me look elsewhere for a community.

response 16 of 152:

Jun 6 13:15 UTC 1995

   Good question on what to do if the new person doesn't supply any
interests.  One thought might be to use the a default conference, which
would likely mean agora?

response 18 of 152:

Jun 6 16:11 UTC 1995

It has been suggested before to provide some default conferences
for newusers. Maybe ask if that is OK, and provide the means to change
the choices, if you are feeling benevolent :). The two suggested
were agora and coop, but I'd expand that to include info, and.....
(radio ;->). Maybe five or six default cfs would do - and maybe even
switch a couple of them around. This will provide all newsusers
with automatic entry to several conferences, and maybe motivation to
look at others (or cancel some given to them!). 

Currently when one joins a new conference, even agora for newusers,
only the first and last items are "new". Sometimes that can be
overwhelming, especially in agora. I'd like to suggest that newcomers
to conferences be shown a short FAQ for that cf, but that everything
be marked as read initially, so they only automatically read new
responses. This might reduce the overload factor that several here
have mentioned.

response 20 of 152:

Jun 7 03:13 UTC 1995

  The problem is that the people who create accts toi use the confs are
now far fewer than the ones who create logins to get email addresses
file space or use the party conf.  The confs need to be more user
friendly, which is why I've been pushing for more agora restarts and
a better way of presenting the confs.

I think it might be time to get rid of some dead weight confs too,
like "hippie" and "sports"

response 22 of 152:

Jun 7 16:23 UTC 1995

Dead weight is all in one's opinion. :)

(oh, wait, that pun doesn't work here. Never mind.)

response 24 of 152:

Jun 8 12:35 UTC 1995

Hm.  I like the idea of prompting people with conference names in order
to set up a .cflist file for them.  But I think it would scare newbies
off to ask them 80 times "do you want to join the so-and-so conference",
especially if they're not really sure what a conference is.  Also,
you're still left with the problem of teaching people to use the "next"
command to go check out their other conferences.  I dunno why people are
so resistant to using it.

Also, do we really want all the conferences to be as active as agora?
Quiet conferences are sometimes nice.