response 114 of 168:

Nov 20 13:28 UTC 2001

Something I like to do on M-Net is enter the funniest thing anyone ever 
read, and then the instant someone says, "That's the funniest thing I 
ever read," I scribble it, which on M-Net means it's gone forever.  If 
the timing is right, which I've managed to make it be a couple of 
times, the response is entered and scribbled in the space of a few 
minutes and no one after that gets to see it.  Most satisfying.  

The Grex version of this trick is to enter the response "Gotcha!" at 
some critical point in an item (preferably an item about the censored 
log, natch) and then immediately scribble it.  Someone goes to read the 
censored log to find out what you said, and there's your gotcha.

This sort of playing with the system's peculiarities used to be much 
more popular than it is now.  Call me immature and I'll call you old.

response 116 of 168:

Nov 20 20:34 UTC 2001

Something else you can do on M-Net is enter an item on one subject, 
wait until a bunch of "mnetters" enter responses to it, then edit the 
item to something else entirely.  I once entered an item announcing 
that I was leaving M-Net for good, then after a bunch of people had 
responded (incredibly, considering the abuse I heap on them) with "No! 
Please don't go!" I edited the header and text to "I'm going to the 
movies tonight."  There are much better uses you could put this feature 
to, obviously, but that's the only time I ever did it.  I don't know 
why this isn't done more often on M-Net.  (Or maybe it is and I haven't 
noticed?)

response 118 of 168:

Nov 21 14:31 UTC 2001

Re 115: heh.

response 120 of 168:

Nov 21 16:41 UTC 2001

I'd be surprised if anyone thought I had voted against it. :)

response 122 of 168:

Nov 22 09:00 UTC 2001

Sorry to be an albaugh-come-lately to the discussion of this motion (voting
is already underway), but by testing I dicovered this:

Response not possible.  Pass? scribble 99
Cannot censor frozen items!

This may have been well known to many/most grexians (somehow I doubt it), but
it strikes me that closing the censored log would not afford "equal
protection" to those who wish to publicly retract their comments, in the
case of frozen items.  In the worst case, a "malicious" item creator might
deliberately freeze his item, just to prevent off-the-cuff Joe from making
a retraction.

It could easily be argued that this is an issue with the scribble command,
and doesn't have a bearing on closing the censored log.  But since the vote
extends for another week, I'd be interested to hear what other people think
about this.

response 124 of 168:

Nov 22 20:36 UTC 2001

So in separate action we find a way to scribble frozen items.

response 126 of 168:

Nov 23 05:11 UTC 2001

I dug around a bit in backtalk's source and figured a fairly painless way to
enable this.  The next backtalk release (if I ever get it out the door -
version 1.1.7 has a huge list of deep changes that haven't all been ironed
out yet) will be configurable to enable erasing responses in frozen items,
if desired.

There are sound technical reasons why this wasn't allowed in Picospan. 
Erasing requires editing a flag bit in the header of the response, but frozen
items are marked frozen by having write permissions turned off, making it
impossible to edit the file.  My kludge was to thaw the item before opening
it, and then immediately refreezing it after it is open.  This means that the
item is very briefly thawed whenever such a operation is executed - or at
least partially thawed - state information is also in sum file, but that is
mostly less authoritative.  So enabling this might make it possible for a
really hardworking user to post a response to a frozen item.  Which isn't so
horrible a thing but it's kind of an ugly anyway.  In the best of all possible
worlds, we'd find some other way than permission bits to flag an item's state.

There are also likely philosophical reasons why people might think it
shouldn't be possible to erase from a frozen item.  So whether or not we
enable this Backtalk feature is still open for discussion.

response 128 of 168:

Nov 25 05:25 UTC 2001

Re #126: and why isn't there a way to have locking to prevent anything but
the process doing the scribbling from changing the item?

response 132 of 168:

Nov 25 17:02 UTC 2001

Re #130: because backtalk does not run as superuser.

response 134 of 168:

Nov 25 22:52 UTC 2001

Re #129: I suspect that if you decide you care, the fix might be to have
item frozenness marked by something other than unix permissions.

response 136 of 168:

Nov 26 14:57 UTC 2001

Is mdw lurking on this, or will/can he weigh in?