response 25 of 62:

Feb 4 18:35 UTC 1998

I never want to take the time to run a "p", but as a conf fw, I wouldnt
mind a faster way to get a list of all the conf subscribers, so I could
mass e-mail everyone once in a while to remind them of what's going on
in the confs.  People *do* forget about confs they've joined, particularly
if they dont include them on their .cflists.  

response 27 of 62:

Feb 5 18:33 UTC 1998

I'm not sure unsolicited mailings are a good idea.  

People are already overwhelmed with spam and an unsolicited mailing from the FW
of a conference you tried and didn't like would probably fall into that
category.  (Few people think to resign from a conference they tried once.)

response 29 of 62:

Feb 5 21:29 UTC 1998

I guess this is a marcus question, but couldnt picospan be updated
so it also keeps separate conf participation lists in a central list?
Is this something that would be hard to do?  Who wants to spend two
hours running a "p"!

response 31 of 62:

Feb 6 01:54 UTC 1998

Re: 29:  PicoSpan could keep a list of participants, but at the expense of
being slower to use.  That's a basic programming tradeoff.  I don't know if
modifications to PicoSpan are even possible, given the history of how we get
to use it.

response 33 of 62:

Feb 6 06:13 UTC 1998

I'm not sure that people would object to getting mail advertizing the
conferences, or other things Grex does.  I work at a somewhat large ISP.  A
while back, we made some fairly major changes to how people had to log on,
so to avoid a situation where nobody could log on anymore, somebody threw
together a script to e-mail everybody in the password file, and sent out a
mass mailing documenting the changes.  Then somebody else started using that
script to send out occasional messages telling customers about new services
we were offering, upcoming changes that would increase performance even though
there was nothing the customers had to do to prepare for them, and things like
that.  I thought people would see it as more unsolicited spam and get upset.
Instead, people started writing back saying they liked being kept informed,
sometimes even suggesting that we should send out messages like that more
often.  The conclusion I've drawn from that is that people really don't object
to mass e-mails if they know where they're coming from and isn't just trying
to sell them something.

In Grex's case, since we don't have paying customers, I wonder how much we
should care if people using Grex object to being told about the things that
those of us who are funding and maintaining Grex think are Grex's important
features.  If people using Grex for free e-mail were to object to an
occasional message telling them what this system they're using is, then I'm
really not all that motivated to keep providing free service to them.

response 35 of 62:

Feb 6 09:39 UTC 1998

Re #32: Oh right - forgot about 'locate', which centralizes
everything. Come to think of it, seems not too hard to write
a script which takes a conference name as argument and generates
a fast participant list by looking up the conference directory
in the conflist file, getting the participation file name from
the conference config file, invoking 'locate' to generate the
participant list, and reformatting the output suitably.

This wouldn't give quite as much information as the built-in
Picospan locate command, and accuracy depends on the locate
database being up-to-date, but it'd be pretty fast.

response 37 of 62:

Feb 6 17:23 UTC 1998

I must say that Steve has swayed my thinking on this.

I'd still hate to see it used very often -- but mostly from the PoV of taxing
Grexes resources.  In reading Steve's response I thought that maybe, just
maybe, such mailings occasionally could give people more of a sense that this
is a community they've joined rather than a "cheap AOL clone".

Dunno.  I'd have to think about it some more....

response 39 of 62:

Feb 6 20:59 UTC 1998

(maybe adding a wrapper of sorts similar to ".partymsg" to the mail
programs?)

response 41 of 62:

Feb 7 02:59 UTC 1998

There is a script that shows people messages about changes to the party
program when they run it.  To avoid showing people the same message over and
over again, the script has to keep track of who has seen which messages.  I
believe it uses the .partymsg file for that.  If it's a zero byte file, it
must go by the date on the file, rather than its contents.

If I understand Carson's suggestion correctly, he's suggesting a script around
the mail programs that will send a user any system messages they haven't
already seen every time they check their mail.  That's a much more effecient
way of doing things.

In Grex's case, I hadn't been thinking in terms of sending a message to
everybody.  If we are going to do that, what Carson suggested is definitely
the way to go.  If people are thinking of just doing a mass mailing to a bunch
of people, that will work much better in terms of the messages to 30 or so
users people have been talking about than it would for sending a message to
absolutely everybody.

response 43 of 62:

Feb 7 08:12 UTC 1998

The idea would be to copy the functionality of the .partymsg file, such that
it would check whether somebody had seen the message already, and only send
it if they hadn't.

response 47 of 62:

Feb 7 16:54 UTC 1998

Marcus, my main interest is, as you say, to attract new people who
are already on Grex into the conferences.  If my estimate of 150
conferencers out of 16,000 users is right, we are only getting 1%
of the users into the conferences.

response 49 of 62:

Feb 7 23:07 UTC 1998

You can use the msgs program to do that.