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Grex > Coop10 > #18: The future of the Intro conference | |
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| Author |
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| 25 new of 49 responses total. |
senna
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response 25 of 49:
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Jul 24 22:04 UTC 1997 |
Indeed, #23, as many people just hit "read" in a certain conference.
Everything new that shows up appears to them.
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davel
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response 26 of 49:
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Jul 25 18:38 UTC 1997 |
In fact, if they use a .cflist, they just say "next" and it skips the
conference if nothing is new. But if there are interesting new postings,
they'll see them and respond.
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scott
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response 27 of 49:
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Jul 26 11:00 UTC 1997 |
What if Agora item 1 became the "other conferences" item? Then we dump new
users into Agora, and even if they hate it they still see a list of active
conferencs.
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valerie
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response 28 of 49:
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Jul 28 14:35 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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richard
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response 29 of 49:
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Jul 28 15:07 UTC 1997 |
wouldnt it be confusing if item #1 wasnt the welcoming
item though? I'd think it would be disorienting to go into
a conf and not see the firstitem describing the conf.
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valerie
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response 30 of 49:
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Jul 28 20:41 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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senna
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response 31 of 49:
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Jul 29 01:09 UTC 1997 |
Works for me. Make sure that it's frozen soon, so that it's not too long to
be overwhelming
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mary
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response 32 of 49:
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Jul 29 12:31 UTC 1997 |
As long as one of the first responses a new and unknowing
reading would get to is one that explains how to interrupt
reading a thread and move to another response, item, or
conference, then it wouldn't be necessary to have
special items listed first which are frozen with a
tightly controlled content thread.
Valerie almost always enters just such a response.
I think some of what is being suggested here is well
intentioned but probably not necessary or even helpful
if we it means we start having drift police or more
frozen (moderated) items.
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rtgreen
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response 33 of 49:
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Apr 28 05:34 UTC 1998 |
As a new user, I'm still feeling my way around the conferences slowly.
It's true for me, that some of these are quite off-putting. I've been a
Grex user for over a year, and a member for several months now, and today
is the first I've ventured into coop. There just isn't enough time to
wade through the backlog of old response in a new conference. Why aren't
dead items reaped? Evan in the classified conference, where #0 claims
that items will be removed in ## days, I had to wade through _years_ of
old stuff. Is there a form of the 'fixseen' command that will filter
everything before a given date? I haven't found it, so I find myself
repeatedly doing 'q' then 'since mm/dd/yy' for every item. Even backtalk,
where I can see a menu of the items in a conf, doesn't tell me which items
have recent activity.
Some enhancements to bbs that would make it more inviting to at least
this new user:
1) open with a menu of available conferences, giving name & recent traffic
volume stats on one line, with option to join or read description. If the
user has a .cflist, follow that first, then present the global menu...
Maybe sort the list by traffic volume, so that the lonely ones are on the
first page.
2) On the top of the editor panel, as the user is entering a new response,
place the title of the current item, and the reminder to stay on topic or
start a new item.
3) At the respond or pass? prompt, give an option to respond offline to
the submitter's mailbox. This might reduce the volume of off-topic
chatter we have to page through.
4) At the OK: prompt after finishing reading a conference, give the option
to add this conference to one's .cflist
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valerie
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response 34 of 49:
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Apr 28 13:42 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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janc
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response 35 of 49:
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Apr 28 14:20 UTC 1998 |
Some of those idea may find their way into backtalk.
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remmers
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response 36 of 49:
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Apr 28 15:19 UTC 1998 |
I'm not sure how suggestion (3) in #33 would work in practice, since
an item usually has several contributors. At the "Respond or pass"
prompt, any one of them could conceivably be someone you'd want to
send mail related to the item. Note that you can always send mail to
anybody at the "Respond or pass" by typing "!mail <whoever>", so in
effect the mail feature is already there.
Hm, this seems to be the "future of the Intro conference" item. It
hasn't been active for a while. Did we reach a decision on this issue?
Is the Intro cf still an option as the default conference for newusers?
Is anybody maintaining the conference?
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albaugh
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response 37 of 49:
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Apr 28 17:31 UTC 1998 |
Of course, we all know that "read since mm/dd/yy" isn't Y2K compliant... ;-)
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other
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response 38 of 49:
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Apr 28 17:59 UTC 1998 |
actually , you don't even need the bang (!) at the respond or pass prompt to
mail someone.
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mdw
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response 39 of 49:
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Apr 28 20:15 UTC 1998 |
Actually, "read since mm/dd/yy" is Y2K. PicoSpan wraps dates more than
50 years in the past to the next century; hence "read since 5/1/20"
means everything entered after 2020.
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dang
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response 40 of 49:
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Apr 29 00:50 UTC 1998 |
So in 2041, we will start having things entered on grex wrap to 2091?
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mta
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response 41 of 49:
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Apr 29 13:19 UTC 1998 |
Gads! Sounds like a serious problem to me!
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janc
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response 42 of 49:
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Apr 29 14:10 UTC 1998 |
No. Through the end of 1999 references to dates like 1/5/41 will be wrapped
to 2041. Then after the start of the year 2000 Marcus's wrap logic presumably
won't be used again for another 50 years. Any reference to 1/5/41 will be
simply assumed to be in the current century, thus 2041. In the year 2051
however, the wrap logic will come into its own again, and any references to
dates like 3/14/00 will be wrapped to mean the year 2100, not the year 2000.
At least that's the way I'd expect it to work from what Marcus said.
Backtalk's approach is a little different. From the context of the usage,
Backtalk will interpret ambiguous dates as either past or future dates. In
a "read since" context, the date should always be in the past, so any
ambiguous date is interpreted as the most recent possible date. So "read
since Wednesday" means the begining of the day on the most recent Wednesday
and "read since 4/6/99" means since 1899, not 1999.
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albaugh
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response 43 of 49:
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Apr 30 20:38 UTC 1998 |
I happen to think that "fixed windowing" or other algorithms of mapping
2-digit years to 4-digit years and claiming to be "Y2K compliant" is BS.
It might be sufficient for a business's or application's needs, but it still
relies on assumptions that aren't needed with 4-digit dates.
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scg
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response 44 of 49:
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May 1 03:37 UTC 1998 |
Yes, but four digit dates, where they can be avoided, are really awful from
the user interface standpoint. There's a balancing act there.
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mdw
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response 45 of 49:
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May 1 20:03 UTC 1998 |
Actually, Picospan's 50 year wrap formula is relative to the current
date. So the only time it doesn't apply is dates such as 1950, 2050,
etc. Even this is somewhat mythical since Unix dates are 32-bit
quantites--and it's even a bit worse since some versions of Unix,
including apparently this version of SunOS, think dates are signed, so
the bete noir date is Jan 18, 2038. Try these commands in PicoSpan to
see what happens:
date 1/7/48
date 1/8/38
date 0x 7fffffff
date 0x 80000000
date 7/1/48
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valerie
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response 46 of 49:
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May 4 05:16 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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remmers
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response 47 of 49:
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May 4 10:50 UTC 1998 |
Ah, thanks. I'd forgotten that change had been made.
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tsty
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response 48 of 49:
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May 18 21:07 UTC 1998 |
is it also true that newusers are automatically putin the bourne shell?
or is the shell option still the choice fo the user?
at a newusers house, ctrl-z from Ok: killed the session ....great
puzzlement for a while.
and then, to avoid 'surprises' will chsh work right ...including
adding a .cshrc file to the user's space?
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janc
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response 49 of 49:
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May 19 14:52 UTC 1998 |
Newuser offers a choice of shells.
Chsh sets up appropriate dot files for a user.
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