response 119 of 127:

May 6 14:01 UTC 1999

That's a good question.  I have no idea what the answer is.  I get mail
fairly frequently from people who are interested in buying outgoing access
(that's the way they're thinking of it), and want to know if we'll cut
them a deal, or want to know if we'll allow eggdrop, or something like
that.  I can't think of a time when I got mail like that from someone who
was local to Ann Arbor, though.  That could just be because I'm the
treasurer, though - a lot of the people who write are people who want to
know how they can pay if they are in India or Spain or Finland or Mexico
or some other place. 

response 121 of 127:

May 6 21:23 UTC 1999

Not very many.  However, is dialin and telnet out useful to people?

One other thing to keep in mind.  Currently, we get huge numbers of
people who want to run bots.  Those bots don't run, because we restrict
outgoing internet.  If we stopped, people would run these bots, even
though we don't allow them, and even though they get killed when the
person logs out, and swamp our internet connection.  On top of that,
they will try to find a way to stay logged in all the time, so their bot
won't get killed.  That's what I'd try to do in a similar situation. 
That means a perpetually full Grex with no-one doing anything.

Then again, maybe not.  That's what I'd expect, tho.

response 123 of 127:

May 7 05:25 UTC 1999

Mary in resp:118 :: First, what is the community whose needs you 
wish to address?  And then, how does Grex determine what people "need?"

Judging by sheer numbers, perhaps what potential Grex users "need"
more than anything is a place to run IRC bots.  I'd expect that
hosting IRC bots would be vastly more popular, in terms of the 
number of people served, than conferencing.   Should we wind up 
the conferences and dedicate Grex to meeting the need for 
free bot hosting?        
                                 :)

response 125 of 127:

May 7 23:57 UTC 1999

Re #120: I don't see what that has to do with anything.  Grex is not
`most ISPs'; grex is something different and special.

In fact, grex has somewhere around ten phone lines *that actually get
used* for things other than ppp, so clearly there is some demand for
non-ppp use.

Now, one would suspect that at least 5% of those users have no
internet access other than grex, can't afford $60/year, and would find
some sort of additional outgoing access useful.

Re #121: Most of the people who want to run such bots don't live
within the local calling area on Ann Arbor, so I don't expect this
will be an issue.

Re #123: I tend to think that grex should try to offer the widest
variety of services it can with the resources it has.  Sure, there is
some concern that grex may not have the resources to offer these
services, but we don't yet know for sure whether it does or doesn't.
I think we should give it a chance.

Even if we're giving people the techological ability to run bots, we
tell them they shouldn't be doing that.  And if people around Ann
Arbor demonstrate that they are going to ignore that too consistenly,
then I suppose offering free outgoing access is a bad idea.  But we
haven't yet demonstrated that that's the case.

Another idea that comes to mind: we could require that people under 18
who want free access involve their parents somehow.  The group of
crackers that made life really painful for the FSF back in 1997 was
mostly around 15 and 16 year old people; I think that as people get
older, they become less interested in running bots.

Or we could just let teenagers get acccess, and if it becomes a
problem, we consider amending the policy with suitable parental
consent requirements.

Re #124: I hadn't been thinking there should be an explicit trial
period, but maybe that's reasonable.  Perhaps having a trial period
that's based on the number of users (IE, for the first three months we
offer free authenticated access, we only offer it to the first 100
people to sign up; if there are no problems in that time period, then
we open it up to everyone, else we have a member vote on whether we
want to allow such access at all.  Or maybe we just say that the staff
has discression to pick arbitrary numbers for how many people to allow
access for the first three months we're allowing free authenticated
access, so it can be 100 for the first month, and then 1000 the next
month (though I'll really be surprised if we hit 1000, but don't
really know what the numbers are), etc.)

If we have any trial provision, I would like it to be the case that
after the first three months, a member vote is required to make
anything happen other than giving anyone who wants it access (assuming
they're within the local calling area).

response 127 of 127:

Sep 11 02:38 UTC 1999

I think the number of people each day who try to run bots is around a 
dozen, even though they are told several times while making their 
account that we don't allow it and it won't work.  Staff may be able to 
elaborate here.

When I first came to grex and discovered that people got logged out 
after inactivity it took me about 40 *seconds* to write something that 
kept me logged in 24x7.

Given these and the number of students in the area I'm afraid allowing 
outbound access will be crippling.