response 18 of 60:

Sep 23 14:31 UTC 2002

I also don't think Richard's totally off the wall here.  I think that users
who unexpectedly find themselves in a conference (or, sometimes, even an item)
whose last activity was years ago are often confused, and we can do things
to mitigate this.  I do think that Richard's analysis of the problem is wrong,
and that his proposed solution is not a good idea, at all.

As far as his comments in #13, I'm not sure that he's right that Grex isn't
various people's primary conferencing place, is totally right.  When I first
showed up on Grex, not all *that* long after it came on line, Marcus had
recently pretty much vanished from Grex (including responding to Grex-related
email), for over a year I think, because of the need to maintain other things
in his life; and life offline has certainly grown for Valerie & STeve. 
Certainly the explosion of other forums has had an effect; I probably spend
more time monitoring a handful of (moderately low-volume!) mailing lists than
I ever *should* have spent on Grex, these days.  I don't know that Grex needs
to aim to be anyone's driving passion.

response 20 of 60:

Sep 23 15:53 UTC 2002

There is an important difference between deleting and archiving.  It appears
that no one except Richard wants to delete things.

To use the books in a Library example, things at the branch library which
haven't been read in six months shouldn't be tossed out, then should be 
moved to the main branch.

The problem is not just dead conferences, it is also dead items in active
conferences.  Picospan helps a bit by making only the first and last items
new when someone joins.  There are at least two problems with this:

   - The browse command lists 100+ items, with no indication of which ones
     are active, or even how old then are.

   - When someone does respond to a dead item, the new person is shown
     hundreds and hundreds of old responses.  As I remember they are shown
     without a date, which makes things worse.

My suggestion: Do NOT get rid of the "dead" stuff, move it somewhere.

This could potentially get rid of coop1, ..., coopN.  There would be just
coop and archived-coop, which might make finding fairly old things easier.

response 22 of 60:

Sep 23 16:35 UTC 2002

Why not use a setting? per user? Which the default being a year, and the
FW's able to specify less, (allowing for busy areas).

response 24 of 60:

Sep 23 19:58 UTC 2002

Feel free to promote.

response 26 of 60:

Sep 23 21:40 UTC 2002

Trolling you may not be, Richard, but you are tiresome and clueless.

response 28 of 60:

Sep 24 00:15 UTC 2002

I don't know about Richard, but most people I know go through "phases",
and do different things.  I don't know what else I currently do that
Richard would call "conferencing"; I suppose there are other places I
could go to scratch the "itch", but none quite like grex.  There are
certainly things I do that aren't directly related to conferencing.

The founders never intended the board to have an activist role in the
online conferences.  The idea was very much that the conferences would
by & large manage themselves.  Except for Richard, I find it hard to
conceive that there are other people who think the board ought to take a
more activist role in directing conference activity today.  Mostly I
think things have worked fine on their own; the only fault I think we
have is that too much stuff only happens in agora and we haven't made
enough of an effort to push things out to other conferences.  I don't
see how removing dead material would help this, and I'm not at all
convinced the board should be leading a charge to fix things in any
case.

Perhaps something interesting to consider would be the typical tree.
With most trees, what is the "living breathing" organism is not the sum
total.  Generally there is only a very thin layer of actual growth,
which contains within it a more mature layer of dedicated material that
provides structural support and a nutritional network, which in most
trees surrounds an inner layer of actual dead material, which may or may
not be either structural sound, rotting, or in some trees may even be
eaten away (all depending on the species).  That very thin layer of
green growth is in turn protected by another layer of dead stuff.  Of
course, this mainly describes the trunk; as much as half the tree may be
buried underground.  Then there are the leaves, which are in most cases
intended to be ephemeral solar collectors.  Attempting to chop out the
"dead" inner wood would of course destroy the tree.

I get the feeling that Richard thinks grex is like a green herb, and
that old stuff, the dead stuff, is a sign of some sort of advanced
disease, which will eventually choke out any signs of life.  Kind of
like a lawn with a superadvanced case of thatch.  I don't think that's
really the case at all.  Especially in agora, I'd say we have a very
well defined "ring" structure, with successive layers of old
conferences, and the current conference.  I doubt the kind of pruning
activity Richard envisions would really help.  At best, it would stir up
a bunch of dust.  At worst, it could be more like smashing the bone to
get at the marrow, and never mind what happens to any meat or skin.

response 30 of 60:

Sep 24 14:35 UTC 2002

I just entered a new item in the Hippie cf.  The trouble is, people 
enter items in Agora that they could've entered in the specialty 
conferences.  They're afraid if they enter them in the specialty 
conferences no one will read them, because no one goes there, because 
no one enters items there, because no one will read them, because no 
one goes there, because...

response 32 of 60:

Sep 24 16:10 UTC 2002

Re 30> You're right, people do enter items in agora because they don'tthink
they'll get an audience in a speciality cf. However, how many people really
read the speciality cfs? Grex has lost quite a few users over the years, and
gained quite a few. This has resulted in less readers of speciality cf, but
hardly any new members for them. So though there may be some old timers still
reading, the audience isn't quite as large as one would like. 

response 34 of 60:

Sep 24 16:13 UTC 2002

Actually, you can avoid that problem by entering the item in the other
conference, then asking Katie to link it to agora.  She honors all link
requests, within reason.

response 36 of 60:

Sep 24 16:27 UTC 2002

Re #12: Maybe the reason you don't see the board talking about conferences
is because most people think the system is working just fine.  So far you
seem to be the only one who thinks that there's much of anything wrong with
it.  Incidentally, in the last month or to a few newbies have shown up in
micros and made posts saying how interesting it was to read all that old
stuff.

Re #13: I *do* use Grex as my primary...no, my *only* source for
conferencing.  It's far more active than most other places I've found, even
with all the "dead conferences", and much more engaging.

Re #23: Grex is *both* a museum and a lively place for discussion.  There's
room for both to coexist.

Re #32: I read quite a few specialty conferences, but it's not obvious
because I rarely post there.  A lot of people have them quietly lurking in
their .cflists, though.  Generally I post specifically related discussions
to those places, and my more general political and current-events stuff goes
in agora.

response 38 of 60:

Sep 24 18:46 UTC 2002

Here is an idea remmers should like, create a MostActive conference.
Automatically link anything in any other conference to MostActive.

One rule of Orkan philosophy is: Never fix anything that works.  Another
is: Anything can be improved.  While these may seem to be contradictory,
they are not.

For the most part this argument seems to be going on between those who
think Grex is broken, and those who think change means fix.

response 40 of 60:

Sep 24 20:49 UTC 2002

Orkan?  Like, the bad guys in Lord of the Rings, or Nanoo-Nanoo?