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| Author |
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janc
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Web-Page Building on Grex
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Nov 14 20:51 UTC 1995 |
Lately Grex has developed a new class of users -- web-page builders. We
seem to have a good number of users who log in here only to create and
maintain a web page.
This seems to me to be very much the kind of activity that uses Grex
resources, while contributing very little to the Grex community.
I should note that I have talked to some who seemed eager to send in money
to Grex. I doubt if they contribute less than other users in the financial
sense.
Certainly we want to continue to allow people to create web-pages, but some
of these can be rather resource intensive, much more so than the users who
only log in to read and send mail.
I have mixed feelings about this, and no idea whatsoever what, if anything,
should be done about it. I thought collecting opinions and ideas might
be useful. That's what this item is for.
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| 382 responses total. |
kerouac
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response 1 of 382:
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Nov 15 00:26 UTC 1995 |
Is there any chance that with new SUN equipment, there can be .gifs
and graphics on the homepages or would they still take up too much space?
I have mixed feelings as well about web pages because most seem to be
geared as much toward vanity and self promotion as toward a legitimate
desire to share one's interests.
I guess one reason people might want their grex logins iimmortalized
in the case of their death, is so their homepage will be out there
outliving them. A few decades from now, we'll be running into a lot of
dead peoddead people's web pages without even knowing it!
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ajax
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response 2 of 382:
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Nov 15 06:46 UTC 1995 |
More important than the space images take up, I think, is the portion
of Grex's Internet bandwidth they take when people access them. I don't
know where packets from http servers are prioritized relative to other
Internet services, but with a 28.8k link, either the web pages with
graphics would be almost unusably slow, or if they got adequate priority,
then Grex's telnet or mail transmissions might become unusably slow.
Jan, can you give more info on "some of these can be rather resource
intensive?" Like, what resources? With graphics and CGI scripts disabled,
it seems like just text pages would be undemanding. But depending on the
web server software, and frequency of access, I guess they could be.
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rcurl
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response 3 of 382:
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Nov 15 06:54 UTC 1995 |
This question is part of the larger question of how Grex should allocate
its limited resources, or even *if* Grex should implement any allocation.
We already suppress .gifs, and maybe it will be the turn of homepages
next. I think that an "item by item" approach will be both very time
consuming as well as inherently unfair. I propose that we consider
implementing limits on *resource use*, as represented by filespace, file
transfer (including reading homepages), and on-Grex activities. What the
resource use is for, as long as its legal, should be of much less concern.
However there is a further question of how Grex wants to allocate its
resources. We say we are a conferencing system, but I don't think that is
the primary consumer of resources. Like Jan, I also think that the uses to
which Grex are put should include, to some extent, activities by each user
that "contribute to the Grex community", as well as others that meet the
individual wants of the users. This could be approached by deciding the
"rankings" of Grex uses with respect to its contribution to the Grex
community, and then apply *weights* to the resource limits. If all the
weights are equal, then we just have resource limits. However if the
weight on .gif transfer, or a homepage (as examples - no immediate
judgement of prospective weights are implied) is set higher, those uses
would count more heavily against the users limits.
Is this a type of approach that would both retain the freedom that Grex
offers and respond to Grex's limited resources?
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janc
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response 4 of 382:
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Nov 15 06:57 UTC 1995 |
How resource intensive they are depends on the size and amount of traffic.
I spoke to one person who wanted to set up a site for various Olde English
manuscripts (Beowulfe and stuff like that). He was very willing to try
to keep things small and expressed interest in donating money, plus it
sounded like kind of a neat project, but things of that sort could potentially
be a non-trival load. GIFs aren't the only big files in the world.
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rcurl
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response 5 of 382:
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Nov 15 07:06 UTC 1995 |
Exactly. A file-transfer limit would constrain both uses equally.
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popcorn
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response 6 of 382:
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Nov 15 07:25 UTC 1995 |
I'm not sure our gif blocks are working right.
Re 2: telnet and the interactive parts of ftp sessions get high priority
in tcp/ip. Everything else gets low priority, including http.
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srw
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response 7 of 382:
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Nov 15 08:04 UTC 1995 |
In fact, the low priority that http gets causes it to fail to work
when the interactive load gets too high. It slows down to 0, and
then the clients time out, thinking the server is down.
Because http traffic doesn't influence telnet traffic very greatly,
I think the use of large files is self-limiting. I personally am
not convinced that we need to be blocking gif files, but that is
our policy at present.
Given the open nature of our system, I think it is reasonable to
allow users to have web pages, despite failing to contribute to
Grex in any other way. We could restrict it to members only,
then it might generate revenue for the treasury.
http service will never be acceptably fast unless we can upgrade our link
to a faster speed, and even then it probably still won't be quite
"acceptable".
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scg
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response 8 of 382:
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Nov 15 08:14 UTC 1995 |
This comes down to the old question of what, exactly, Grex is for. Certainly
we are a conferencing system, but the wonderful thing about Grex, to me, has
always been that we were more than that. To those who have had access to fast
computers with fast Internet connections, Grex may not be much more than just
a conferencing system, but for those who don't have that kind of resources
Grex can be useful for a lot more.
When I first got on Grex, it certainly wasn't for the conferences. I had seen
discussion areas, which I guess could have been called conferences, on other
local BBSs, and they hadn't impressed me. I started Grexing because I heard
that there was this free system that I could get to by calling 761-3000 that
I could use for Internet e-mail. As a high school student in the days, just
a few years ago, when high schools weren't providing e-mail to their students,
that was something I couldn't get anywhere else, so Grex was a great resource.
Once I started using Grex for mail, I also started playing around with the
Unix shell a bit, and combining the free shell access I had on Grex with a
Unix book I bought was able to learn a fair amount about Unix. Several months
later I discovered the conferences, and started using them too. Like
everything else I had found on Grex, they too were a cool thing to play with.
Now conferences and party are pretty much all I do on Grex, because I have
better access in other places, but I'm sure there are other people out there
in the same situation I was in a little more than three years ago when I first
discovered Grex.
That said, conferences and party are a big part of Grex, and as Grex's
discussion areas they are the things that really keeps Grex's "community"
together. I don't think we want to do anything to make those two parts of
Grex any slower than they have to be. Still, we have to consider that they
may not be all that Grex should be.
It all comes down to what kind of limits we want to put on things. We
certainly don't have the bandwidth for big gifs, and probably not even for
little gifs, so when we figure out a good way of technically blocking those,
we should definitely do it. In the mean time, we should discourage them.
With text, OTOH, it really doesn't take up any more bandwidth than any of the
other text leaving Grex, and those who can't afford to pay an ISP to hold
their homepage, or don't consider it worth what ISPs charge, still can benifit
quite a bit from having an outlet for their creativity. Like it or not, one
of the things that Grex does best is to educate people, in lots of different
was. One of those ways is by letting them write a lot, for an audience rather
than just for a teacher. Letting people put up a text only homepage is an
excellent way of doing that. So is having conferences.
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scg
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response 9 of 382:
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Nov 15 08:15 UTC 1995 |
(srw slipped in)
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ajax
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response 10 of 382:
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Nov 15 08:15 UTC 1995 |
Jan, your point about text files also being big is taken. But I'm
interested in whether your concern is due to web pages *currently*
using a large chunk of any of Grex's resources (and if so, which), or
due to its creating a potential problem in the future? Good question
either way, but my opinion would be swayed if I found out half our
Internet bandwidth is eaten by http traffic! :-) I would *think*
srw's "self-limiting" theory would keep it low, but you never know.
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gregc
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response 11 of 382:
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Nov 15 09:27 UTC 1995 |
I want to note something here. Srw and I got into a small disagreement about
http in the staff conference. Steve, you made the comment that "http is
not an inefficiant protocol". I agree, I never said the http protocol
itself was inefficiant. My assertion, is that the Web paradigm *encourages*
a style of programming that is inefficiant.
I've seen web pages that could have been encoded with 5 highlighted pieces
of text that say essentially "click me", but instead the user chose to
make each of those buttons a 20K gif file that says "Click Me" in 256 colors
with nifty graphics.
The paradigm encourages extravagance, and that extravagance devours net
bandwidth.
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robh
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response 12 of 382:
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Nov 15 11:01 UTC 1995 |
gregc has hit the nail on the head, IMHO. Every time I visit
my parents' house and use their super-duper Pentium to connect
to CompuServer and run Mosaic, I'm constantly underimpressed
with what the Web looks like. From here, on Lynx, either a page
has lots of text (great) or lots of [INLINE] markers and nothing
else (no problem, I never visit there again). But I get on
with Mosaic, I sit there for five minutes waiting for an image to
download, and it's a button that says "click here" or "go back"
or "send mail". Did I really need to spend five minutes on-line
for "click here"? (Which, in Lynx, wouldn't have taken five seconds
to download?)
I still love the Web, but I will never understand the desire for
huge pointless pictures. I outgrew pretty pictures in books when I was
five years old, and as far as I'm concerned, anyone who NEEDS
images to make their home page good is a five-year-old.
I'd like to see Grex provide a Web presence for those who can't
shell out the bucks for a glitzy page somewhere else, but I
don't think we should sacrifice our bandwidth to let people
get glitzy here.
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popcorn
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response 13 of 382:
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Nov 15 15:41 UTC 1995 |
Re 10: At some point Marcus collected some statistics about how much
of Grex's net bandwidth was being taken up by the very small number of
graphical files that were on people's web pages. I don't remember the exact
numbers, but they were surprisingly large. That was when he added the blocks
to httpd to prevent people from using graphics on Grex.
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gregc
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response 14 of 382:
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Nov 15 17:10 UTC 1995 |
Robh said:
> I still love the Web, but I will never understand the desire for
> huge pointless pictures. I outgrew pretty pictures in books when I was
> five years old, and as far as I'm concerned, anyone who NEEDS
> images to make their home page good is a five-year-old.
While I think the web encourages extravagance, I won't go as far as the
above analysis. I think it's obvious why alot of people do it. Computers
in general and the Internet in particular, have been hemmed in by a text-
only interface for most of their existance. It's only recently that graphics
started to become do-able. For many years, people have had graphically
oriented information that they wanted to display, but had to resort to crude
ascii-graphics(of which we have alot on Grex BTW), or rely on proprietary,
incompatable, graphics exchange methods. Now, along comes the web, with a
standardized methodology for passing graphics around, and people who have been
frustrated all these years, are going alittle crazy. I think it's a fad, once
the novelty wears off and people get tired of waitng for 5 minute web page
loads, you'll see the graphics disappear from the glitz-only locations and
only be used where they are necasary.
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rcurl
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response 15 of 382:
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Nov 15 19:22 UTC 1995 |
I agree. My amazement with glitzy graphics has already gone stale.
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danr
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response 16 of 382:
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Nov 15 21:20 UTC 1995 |
...but to bring this back to whether or not we should encourage personal web
pages.
My opinion is that personal web pages are fine, but that there should be some
limit as to how many bytes that web page can contain. I don't know exactly
what that number is, maybe 100 kbytes, maybe 250 kbytes.
I also think that we should not allow users to set up web pages for
commercial purposes.
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n8nxf
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response 17 of 382:
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Nov 15 21:35 UTC 1995 |
Grex allows advertising for comercial purposes. I've also sent e-mail
via this system for comercial purposes. I like the idea of limiting the
size of the web page though.
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meg
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response 18 of 382:
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Nov 15 22:53 UTC 1995 |
This is interesting cause netmeg has like unlimited space for web pages
at the moment. Maybe we can set something up.
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robh
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response 19 of 382:
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Nov 16 03:53 UTC 1995 |
Re 16 - I hope we don't make the limit 100kb, I'm already over that.
With nothing but text! >8)
Re 14 - Well, I'm not saying that I think all graphics suck.
There are a few sites I can remember that I really
enojyed viewing graphically via Mosaic. Curiously, those
were the pages that looked really great in Lynx, too.
When someone puts effort into making their pages look
good under multiple platforms, it shows.
You have to remember, though, being both the Webmaster and a
helper, I'm constantly bombarded with users begging and
pleading to let them have graphics here, because without
graphics their pages are going to suck, and they don't know
what they can do. (Hmm, maybe shell out the whole $2 a month
for a Web site on one of the low-cost providers I keep seeing
ads for on Usenet? Naaaaaaah...)
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rcurl
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response 20 of 382:
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Nov 16 07:32 UTC 1995 |
I was going to say that I didn't see how anyone could make a homepage
worth reading over ca. 10kB 8^?. I constructed one for mnac that
seems too long - at 5kB. I fear to read your's, Rob B^].
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remmers
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response 21 of 382:
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Nov 16 10:57 UTC 1995 |
The term "homepage" seems to be used in two different ways--
as a person's "main" document, or as the whole collection of
web-accessible documents that they keep in their directory.
One 100kb document would be a bit excessive, but a collection
of smaller documents whose size totals to 100kb is a different
story, and the latter is what Rob has.
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remmers
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response 22 of 382:
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Nov 16 11:06 UTC 1995 |
And as far as size limits are concerned--there's a disk quota
(don't remember exactly what it is, but I believe it's at least
a megabyte) that we suggest users limit themselves to. Should
we care about how much space a person's web pages use as long
as their total file space stays within the limit?
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robh
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response 23 of 382:
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Nov 16 11:19 UTC 1995 |
I generally use the phrase "Web-space" to refer to all the Web-
accessible documents a user has.
I'm not sure about the inividual file sizes, though. Is it
harder for Grex to send one 100kb document, or twenty 5kb
documents?
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remmers
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response 24 of 382:
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Nov 16 11:44 UTC 1995 |
With a 100kb document, Grex will download the whole 100kb on
every access unless the user aborts the transfer. With twenty
5kb documents, it'll only download 5kb at a time, and most
users will probably access only a subset of the documents.
So a collection of small documents is apt to be less of a
burden on the bandwidth than one big document.
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