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| Author |
Message |
richard
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Unregistered reading a bust?
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Oct 23 00:55 UTC 1997 |
Okay, its been a while now since the policy was put into effect allowing
unregistered reading via Backtalk was put into effect.
Without having any statistics to back it up, it seems like the policy has
been a bust. I have yet to come across one person who joined Grex because
or after they read it anonymously.
I dont think unregistered reading is promoted right on the web page for
one thing, its understated and if you blink twice you might not even
notice the option is even there. Also if someone is jumping into a conf
anonymously, they dont need to be seeing "you have 186 unread items"
It should be set up, if possible, so that in unregistered reading, the
only unread items are those posted that particular day. That way, an
anonymous person will see "there are five unread" or "ten unread messages"
which will seem far more manageable.
We went through to much grief debating this and setting this up, not to
follow up on it and try to improve it so that we start seeing results!
,
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| 61 responses total. |
robh
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response 1 of 61:
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Oct 23 02:56 UTC 1997 |
Is it too early for me to say "told ya so"? >8)
I think that some, if not all, of the folks who supported
unregistered reading did it on principle, not just to get
new members. If that's the case, then it's not a bust,
regardless of the result.
OTOH, I would like to hear what folks think of the results
of the policy so far.
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mta
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response 2 of 61:
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Oct 23 05:31 UTC 1997 |
Dunno. It sure doesn't seem to have been a disaster, at any rate. Lets wait a
while to decide. (We have some PR activities coming up that may make a
difference.)
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mary
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response 3 of 61:
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Oct 23 14:01 UTC 1997 |
Thank you for your second paragraph, Rob.
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dang
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response 4 of 61:
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Oct 23 14:36 UTC 1997 |
I recently did a search on Grex, and AltaVista has lots of indexes into
various anonymous cf's on grex. If someone was to do a search on agora, for
example, they'd get Grex. Don't know how helpful that is... :)
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kaplan
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response 5 of 61:
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Oct 23 22:00 UTC 1997 |
I used the peek syntax once to point a non-grexer to a grex item once.
I am glad that the capability exists.
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robh
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response 6 of 61:
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Oct 23 22:04 UTC 1997 |
Re 3 - You're welcome. Some of us do think before we type. >8)
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steve
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response 7 of 61:
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Oct 24 00:44 UTC 1997 |
I don't think anyone thought that unregistered reading would be a
"boon" to the conference activity here, but there was a lot of light
and heat coming from some folk, thinking that it was horrid that we'd
allow such a thing.
So Rob is right--I voted to allow such reading, not because it
would attract the hordes, but that it didn't make sense not to allow
it. We allow completely unverified telnet access to enable anonymous
readings of conferences, so web-style reading isn't much different.
If anything is to be changed, I would think it should be in
BackTalk, to optimize whatever things that might need it, quite
regardless of wether or not the entity reading a conference is
registered or not. Now, I haven't used BackTalk enough yet, so I
can't say if that should happen or not. It certainly seemed quite
good when I used it. But if we need to tweak things, lets do them
at the appropriate spot.
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janc
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response 8 of 61:
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Oct 24 02:10 UTC 1997 |
Well, yesterday I sent E-mail to Mike Myers (original founder of M-Net).
I asked him to comment on my history article. I gave him the URL of that
and http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/bt/peek:agora:44 , the URL of the
discussion item in Agora. He read the article and the conference item,
and sent me back some comments, including asking for more information
on how to connect to Grex.
So if he ever shows up, maybe that's one near victory for unregistered
reading. Of course, Mike isn't exactly your average new user. Still,
one of the ways you can use this is to put links in your E-mail messages
or home pages to specific things on Grex you want to point people to.
For a pointer to the femme conference do:
http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/bt/peek:femme
For a pointer to this item do:
http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/bt/peek:coop:45
For a pointer this response (assuming nobody slipped in) do:
http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/bt/peek:coop:45:8
The peek script is smart enough to use the pistachio interface for
unregistered users, and there is a blurb at the bottom of the page with
pointers to the registration page.
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valerie
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response 9 of 61:
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Oct 24 13:37 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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krj
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response 10 of 61:
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Oct 24 15:58 UTC 1997 |
Yup, search engines are the controversy, all right.
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steve
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response 11 of 61:
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Oct 25 06:37 UTC 1997 |
An interesting thought. Well, perhaps we should see how many people
would scream if say, Agora were open to search engines. I mean, it is
the front door of Grex--I think that conference would be a great one to
have indexed, and likely keep all the others closed off unless the
participants specifically want it opened.
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cmcgee
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response 12 of 61:
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Oct 25 18:18 UTC 1997 |
I like the idea of keeping everything but Agora closed. For me, it's a
comfortable balance between accessability and privacy.
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valerie
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response 13 of 61:
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Oct 25 20:37 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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steve
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response 14 of 61:
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Oct 26 00:08 UTC 1997 |
Its OK to have links out there that are bad, in search engine land.
Given that Agora lasts 3 months each incarnation, some large fraction
of the people who look up in a search engine and find Grex stuff in an
Agora will find it. Others will find about the existence of Grex at
least, even if they don't find what the search engine produced. Given
that, it doesn't take that much effort to look at the url and try it
without the file specifics, and wind up at Grex's front door.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
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valerie
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response 15 of 61:
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Oct 26 04:02 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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scg
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response 16 of 61:
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Oct 26 04:24 UTC 1997 |
I was one of the people who pushed very strongly to open the conferences up
to anonymous reading, but I'm less comfortable with getting them indexed in
search engines. From what I'm remembering of the discussion at the time of
the vote, there was a very strong stipulation that if anonymous reading were
allowed, steps would be taken to keep the conferences from being indexed.
It's one thing to have Grex's discussions out where people may stumble across
them, but it's quite another to have discussions which take place on Grex pop
up whenever anybody does a search for something contained in the item, or for
that matter, the name of somebody who participated in the discussion. I'm
sure there are plenty of things I've said on Grex over the years that I
woudln't want to be the first thing to pop up when somebody does a search for
my name.
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steve
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response 17 of 61:
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Oct 26 04:35 UTC 1997 |
Certainly some people will jsut go away, thats a given. But if
we sparked an interest, its likely that some people will look us
up and see what we offer.
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scott
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response 18 of 61:
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Oct 26 12:17 UTC 1997 |
Yeah, but given the way old links hang around, and the way Agora rolls
over, after a year or two Grex will be "that place with all the dead
links".
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krj
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response 19 of 61:
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Oct 26 15:44 UTC 1997 |
If you are going to open agora to search engines, you need to
put a warning in the login banner: Anything you write on Grex may
be held against you -- forever.
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orinoco
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response 20 of 61:
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Oct 26 16:32 UTC 1997 |
What about putting links in a web page to one of the conferences? Would
anyone object to that?
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dpc
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response 21 of 61:
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Oct 26 18:21 UTC 1997 |
I'm lacking in data. Can anyone tell us:
1. How many people have read/posted anything on Grex via
Backtalk since it has been available?
2. How many people read/post anything on Grex via
Backtalk in a typical month?
3. What is the fraction of readings via Backtalk
which are done by unregistered folk?
I would strongly oppose indexing conferences on Grex for search
engines.
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janc
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response 22 of 61:
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Oct 28 04:00 UTC 1997 |
I did some things to specifically discourage search engines from indexing the
conferences. However, I am not at all confident that they would index the
conferences if I took those blocks out. If I were writing a search engine,
I'd make it reluctant to index the output from CGI programs. I don't think
we tried to block search engines on HVCN, and it's had anonymous reading much
longer than Grex, and I've never seen an HVCN conference page indexed (and
I have done web searchs that should have hit it if it had been, like searches
for my name, for instance).
In short, actually getting the conferences indexed might be non-trivial.
You'd probably have to do something like convert the conferences periodically
into static web pages and put those up. John Remmers did some software like
this once.
And I'm not sure I'd like it if it did work. Do I really want anyone who
searchs the web for "Jan Wolter" to find every response I've posted on Grex?
Probably not.
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remmers
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response 23 of 61:
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Oct 28 14:40 UTC 1997 |
Hey, I wouldn't mind. I've been trying to get an anthology of
Jan Wolter's writings together for several years now, and a
search engine that would index all his responses would sure
help. :)
Yes, a couple of years ago I wrote a back end to Picospan that
would convert items in a conference to static HTML pages and
generate an index. My thought was that this would be useful for
(1) archiving old conferences in easily retrievable and
searchable form, and (2) making selections of current
items available for easy lookup via Grex's main web page, as
an enticement for people to run newuser and become grexers.
The program was never installed, for a couple of reasons:
(1) people were concerned about search engines indexing the
stuff (the mini-controversy over this was a foreshadowing of
the HUGE argument about non-registered reading through Backtalk),
and (2) Backtalk came along and rendered it obsolete.
Of course, my program still exists and could be run to generate
read-only search-engine-indexable web versions of conferences. Any
objections? :)
Note the smiley. However, currently, I don't think there's any
rule against me or some other user doing something like this on
their own. Simple rule of thumb, folks: If you don't want the
world to be able to find and read your words, don't say your words
on Grex. The Grex conferences are NOT designed for private, or even
limited-access, conversations.
Re the original issue raised in this item: Though I strongly favor
the unregistered reading feature of Backtalk, I never expected it to
bring in huge hordes of new users overnight, or in fact to make much
of a noticeable impact on Grex in the short term. In fact, it hasn't.
I think the whole heated controversy about this feature was pretty
much a tempest in a teapot.
I do find unregistered reading convenient as a way of sharing
information stored on Grex with non-Grexers. I plan to email the URL
of my ragtime item in the music cf. to a couple of people I met at a
ragtime festival I attended last week and who I think are good
potential grexers. Hopefully the bait will entice them into running
newuser. Indeed, if the unregistered reading feature brings us only
a few new users this way, I count it as a success. After all, it's
more than we had before, and the cost is infinitesimal.
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steve
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response 24 of 61:
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Oct 28 20:40 UTC 1997 |
Quite right, John. Grex is open.
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