response 15 of 55:

Oct 14 19:57 UTC 1999

I would be very unhappy if the writing conference went away.  I suspect it
has some interesting material that I would enjoy reading if I ever find
the time to carefully read it...

response 17 of 55:

Oct 14 20:36 UTC 1999

Perhaps it also gives a sense of history and is a useful reference.

response 19 of 55:

Oct 14 22:36 UTC 1999

re 14, 16 is largely correct -- I remember getting an account here for the
first time and thinking that grex was a ghost community due to the dead cf's.
They also wasted my time when I posted some stuff in them and kept coming back
to check for responses, until I realized that they were dead. Sure, the
conferences aren't hurting anything -- but there's almost no point in having
them around; we should just tar.gz them so that they'll be available for
anyone trying to catch up on "history".

response 21 of 55:

Oct 15 03:18 UTC 1999

resp:16 ::  I've floated a proposal before that we find some way to 
segregate the dead conferences so that newbies don't find them
unless they explicitly say: show me the dead conferences.

response 23 of 55:

Oct 15 22:09 UTC 1999

Being something of a minimalist when it comes to bureaucratic structure
and control, I'm not too fond of the idea of zapping conferences for
inactivity, adminstratively labeling conferences as "dead", or whatnot.  

But I like putting power in the hands of the people, so what do folks
think about providing a tool that people could use to find active
conferences, if that's what they want to do?  Technically, it's
feasible.  Here's one way to do it.

(1) Create a dummy account called "jarjar" or something and have it join
every conference on Grex.

(2) Write a front-end shell script that pipes commands into Picospan
which has jarjar run through all the conferences, doing a "fixseen" on
each one.  This will give jarjar a "caught-up" participation file for
every conference.

(3) Write a back-end shell script or program that captures the output
from Picospan produced by running the front-end script.  This will
include all the "number of new responses and brand-new items" lines that
Picospan prints when you join conferences.  Have the back-end save these
numbers in a file in some reasonable format and throw away everything
else, thus generating a report on activity in every conference.

(4) Running the pipeline

        front-end | picospan | back-end

once a week from the jarjar account will produce a report on conference
activity in the last week.  This could be done by a cron job.  Have a
command that people could run which reads the weekly jarjar file and
displays a report of conference activity, with options to show them the
"five most active conferences", "ten most active conferences", "all
conferences", or whatever.  Have a CGI that makes the command avaiable
via the web, for the benefit of Backtalk users.

Comments?

response 25 of 55:

Oct 16 04:56 UTC 1999

You'd have to, since it's not really reading any items.  Otherwise the
response counter doesn't go back to zero.

response 27 of 55:

Oct 17 18:25 UTC 1999

I think such a program would be nice to have.

Picospan has a feature that would help a bit if more fairwitnesses used
it.  It lets fairwitnesses configure which items should be new to new
users.  In particular, you can say, for example,

  first item, last item, item 17 and all items with postings since two
  weeks ago.

So if a new person joins a conference and does "read new," they'll see
the named items, and all the items with recent activity, but not any of
the items that have been abandoned for years.  So the deadwood can be
there, but mostly won't be seen.

This only works if the user first joins the conference with Backtalk. 
Picospan doesn't know about these settings.  It also only works if
conference fairwitnesses set them (last time I looked, there were only a
couple conference on Grex that used this feature).

response 29 of 55:

Oct 18 17:44 UTC 1999

I think this proposed program would be really helpful!

response 31 of 55:

Oct 18 18:37 UTC 1999

It's not ours to tinker with.  Notice the copyright and license information
when you run bbs.

It seems to be a common misconception that Grex owns Picospan.  Grex
doesn't.  Grex just has a license to use it.

response 33 of 55:

Oct 18 21:03 UTC 1999

Not being noticed doesn't make a thing right.

(What's with this attitude that "it's only wrong if I get caught'.  My kids
got over that at age 5.)

response 35 of 55:

Oct 19 00:47 UTC 1999

Why would you need 2BUID0 to write a PicoActivityLevelMeter program?

response 37 of 55:

Oct 19 02:21 UTC 1999

re 35 & 36:  What?