response 1 of 26:

Jul 31 11:48 UTC 1995

Would it be OK to have the name "games" point to the rpg conference,
so that people who type "join games" end up finding something?

response 3 of 26:

Jul 31 17:29 UTC 1995

There are many other games other than role-playing games.

I've been thinking about changing IQ/puzzle to a more game-friendly
conference. If the alias "games" becomes up for grabs, I'd like to 
grab it for the IQ/puzzle conference.

(I take it that means ryan1 isn't using games as his public pissing
ground anymore. :) )

response 5 of 26:

Jul 31 23:58 UTC 1995

  There are a lot of confs that need to be re-thought.  RobH is
openly talking about killing the "sex" conf (due to disinterest and
twitification), and other confs are almost as dead as "games"  The
A-bomb item in agora and related response has gotten me wishing we
had more such response in the "history' conf...but the fw there hasnt
even logged on in two months.
  The problem is that getting new fws and re-starting confs isnt 
necessarily solving the problem.  The problem is re-generating
interest in the confs when it seems like fewer people are using grex
for confing purposes than ever.  Im not exactly sure why this is.
Is it for some of the reasons sidhe is suggesting?  Is it because
new users arent being encouraged to conf?  Is it because non-local
grexers dont want to conf on a non-local board and only want to use
mail and party?
  Grex cant be healthy without a strong conferencing atmosphere...talk
about technical upgrades all you want, but its through conferencing that'
you form a community.  And that is where Grex is falling off these days.

response 7 of 26:

Aug 1 04:38 UTC 1995

The read command defaults to reading only new, non-forgotten items &
responses.  Only if you specify item numbers or ranges do you have to
*say* "new".  So the normal system for people using a .cflist is to enter
"n" (for "next") to go to the next cf with new stuff, and then to say
"r" (for "read") to read said new stuff.

This public service announcement is brought to you by the INFO conference,
where questions such as this one are asked and answered.

response 9 of 26:

Aug 1 19:31 UTC 1995

  One reason I think that the confs are less active might be the fact that
Grex has attracted a high number of younger users in the last year.  There
are nights when one can log on party and have to look long and hard to find
anyone over the age of 16 or 17.  And this is fine, young people need a place
to come to and Grex is good for their purposes.  But few of these people
have any interest in confing because reading confs takes time and few confs
here are orientated to attract their interests.  
  I'd like to see picospan streamlined, maybe offer a separate menu of
conferences for younger people, and a re-organization of the confs in the
main setup.  Clearly some confs should be deleted, and others merged.  I
think drift items that are over a year old or have more than three or four
hundred responses are ridiculous and should be frozen or re-started.
  The basic idea is that picospan conferencing needs to be user-friendly to
new users.  Most new logins are slower to begin with and it makes it very
difficult to get into conferencing in a participatory way.  It speaks
volumes that Grex might have seven or eight thousand users, but probably
not more than a hundred or so who read the confs regularly and less than
that who participate.  I dont see that changing unless picospan is changed
and packaged differently.

response 11 of 26:

Aug 2 00:06 UTC 1995

  I dont know if there is...is there a logging mechanism in picospan that
logs every time someone enters a particular conf?

response 13 of 26:

Aug 2 04:33 UTC 1995

If I'm remembering right (I'm sure Marcus will correct me if I'm wrong), it
does that by looking in each person's home directory for a participation file
for the conference.  It worked well before Grex was on the Internet, but would
now have to go through more than 7,000 home directories.

response 15 of 26:

Aug 2 08:12 UTC 1995

No, PicoSpan doesn't have any easy way to log just "being" in a
conference.  Particularly for agora, that's not a good measure of
conference usage.  Rather than looking at readerrrs, it's best to look
at writers, or active participants, and for that, one need merely look
at the items.  Interesting statistics include the # of users who compose
responses, enter items, the # of responses & items per week, etc.
Passive readers will of course make up the hidden part of the iceberg of
conference usage; but they can assumed to be more or less proportional
to the % of active writing that goes on.

response 17 of 26:

Aug 3 03:06 UTC 1995

set interesting_&_significant_drift OFF
OK, both rpg & iq have been suggested as recipients of the alias "games".
Is there any consensus as to which one it should be?  (I can, of course,
go ahead and kill the games conference leaving this to be decided later.)

response 19 of 26:

Aug 4 08:47 UTC 1995

i think the game aliad should be linked to the iq conference too there are lots
of games in the iq conference and games need iq to work can the iq conference
have the games alias please please with sherry on top thank you :)

response 21 of 26:

Aug 5 19:10 UTC 1995

thank you very very much i will go over and see what i can do to make the

nce that would be nice they would like that maybe i can get people to start
reading it again that would be cool thank you very much again i amnot old
enough to really by sherry though so you will have to get it yourself