response 25 of 82:

Mar 29 21:26 UTC 1999

        I think Barry wrote that one;  it also attaches silly little sayings
to any e-mail that doesn't have a signature already attatched.

response 27 of 82:

Mar 30 05:54 UTC 1999

  How nice for you..  If you know what to expect you can probably concoct
  countermeasures for just about anything the virus-authors can throw at
  you.  However, that doesn't help the millions of people who run with
  Microsoft's criminally lax default settings..

response 29 of 82:

Mar 30 15:34 UTC 1999

It's kind of amusing to live with someone named Melissa who works in
the computer biz... <grins>  Apparently she got a lot of calls from
customers, some of them jokingly asking her if she was responsible
for the 'Melissa' virus.

response 31 of 82:

Mar 31 00:18 UTC 1999

I think you meant to say, "It's not the email message that's infected, it's the
Word document attached to it."

response 33 of 82:

Apr 2 21:24 UTC 1999

   Grex is happily dealing with its new disk for email, but we're
still critically short pon disk space in other areas.  Sometime
very soon, like Friday night (tonight) I plan on using the old
mail area for var.  This will expand an important area by 228M
which will help.  The current /var can then be used for some
other directories that currently reside in my home dir, so I 
think I can give /a about 188M after I move some of them.  That
will buy us some breathing room for adding more disks.  I'll
be entering more about it in garage.

response 35 of 82:

Apr 6 03:58 UTC 1999

   The third stage of disk partition games is over--a new partition,
/x exists.  Two 170M+ directories that staff uses (holding vandal
tools and a database of newusers) will be going on that partition.
Actually, the security directory has already, and you will notice
that /a actually has space, now!  /c will lose space too, once a
few changes are made.

   So then, as a result of all the games of the past week,

 - the mail spool area is 1.75G, up from 699M;
 - the /var area is up, by 200M or so;
 - the /a and /c partitions are or will be up by about 170M each.

   This solves all our immediate disk shortage problems.  We still
need to work on getting more of those donated disks online, but at
least we've stopped the disk shortages for the moment. ;-)

response 37 of 82:

Apr 6 08:05 UTC 1999

 Thanks. STeve. Keep up the great work.

response 39 of 82:

Apr 6 19:13 UTC 1999

I can't imagine an ISP where people work as hard as our volunteers to keep
everything running smoothly.  Grex is wonderful!

response 41 of 82:

Apr 7 11:54 UTC 1999

Probably quite correct.  We often claim Grex isn't an ISP, and it isn't.
Our operation has quite a bit of a different character than an ISP.  An
ISP with 27,000 users would first of all probably have banks of dial-in
lines scattered over a large area, instead of 13 lines in the same place
as their computer.  Maintaining those takes lots of work.  They would
probably have more than one server to maintain.  They would have a
domain name server to maintain.  With customers doing ppp connections
and browsing the web with graphical browsers, they need vastly more net
bandwidth.

On the other hand, they don't do as much original software development,
and some kinds of problems they solve much more easily by throwing money
at it.  They probably clean up fewer fork bombs and mail bombs and other
vandal attacks, just because their users are all paying customers.  The
operations are just not all that similar.

response 43 of 82:

Apr 7 14:11 UTC 1999

I have installed a new version of Backtalk on Grex.  Some of the
changes:

 - In conferences where fairwitnesses have enabled it, you can now
   post HTML responses, including fancy formatting and (if the fair
   witness permitted them) images to be included in responses.  Plain
   text versions are automatically generated for Picospan users to read.

 - The "Clear" button by the post response box is gone, replaced with
   a "Preview" button.  Previewing is mostly useful for people doing
   HTML postings, in which case both the Backtalk and Picospan versions
   of the response will be shown.

 - Some bugs in the behavior of the "forget" button have been fixed.

 - With Picospan, if you join a conference, only the first and last
   items are initially new.  All the rest are "unseen".  Backtalk now
   does the same thing, with one flourish - fairwitnesses can customize
   the list of items which should be new to new users.  Not only can
   you list specific items, but you can say all items that have had
   responses in the last X days should be new.

 - More buttons colors are available for fairwitnesses to choose from.

 - Clickification of URLs in responses should work better.

 - Fixed bug where searching a conference marked it read.

 - Backtalk uses item indexing to find responses faster.  This used to
   have to be manually turned on for each conference (people mostly
   forgot on Grex).  Now it is automatic.

response 45 of 82:

Apr 7 15:18 UTC 1999

Very cool, Jan!

Are the buttons smaller?  The "post" button looks smaller to me than it 
did yesterday.

response 47 of 82:

Apr 7 18:10 UTC 1999

I don't know how feasible a mass face-to-face session would be.

One of my ambitions is to write a fairwitness's guide to Backtalk, but I
haven't done that yet.

I don't think it is actually very hard to figure out, for the most part.
Backtalk is pretty easy to use, probably easier than Picospan.  Just go
to http://www.grex.org and follow the link that says "read the
conferences".  Once you get into your own conference, you'll see some
extra buttons appear, usually all bright red.  These do fairwitness
things.  There is one on the conference home page that says "edit
conference settings".  That gets you to a very wordy page that describes
all the things you can set and gives you buttons to change them with.

To decide if you want to enable HTML and/or images, you might read
item:coop,82 where people discussed all the things that bothered them
about this.

For the "which items should be new to newusers" I think most conferences
would benefit from turning on the feature that makes items new if they
have had new responses in the last X days.  For agora, X should probably
be one or two.  For very slow conferences, 30 days may make sense.  The
idea is that newusers should see a few active items (plus the first and
last item) but not have to wade through dozens of old abandoned items
before seeing anything with any activity in it.

Yup, post button is smaller.

response 49 of 82:

Apr 13 21:24 UTC 1999

   I've changed the web page that talks about Grex offering free shell
accounts, to include the statement (Note: Grex does not allow bots of
ANY kind)  in large red letters.  This statement now appears at the
top of the web newuser form too, in the hope that at least some people
will get the idea that Grex is not for Eggdrop.

   In conjunction with this I have been scouring the net for places
which refer to Grex as a place for bots, and will be sending mail off
to these sites.