response 50 of 299:

Mar 29 04:10 UTC 2005

Would staff determine who counts as a twit?  

response 52 of 299:

Mar 29 05:28 UTC 2005

staff members supporting the censorship idea of a global filter should talk
to Walter Cramer about deleting responses from the raw item files, and its
merits.

response 54 of 299:

Mar 29 23:45 UTC 2005

I guess I should not be surprised that some people find my responses
offensive, but I do because I never attack the person, their family, or use
vile and vulgar language in my responses.

If you find my considered opinions offensive, then so be it.  But if you can't
see a difference between my discussions, and their vile filth, then you really
need to go back to school.

even so, something needs to be done.

response 56 of 299:

Mar 30 00:38 UTC 2005

re #50
I would not want to opt into someone else's interpretation of "annoying user".
I think it would be nice to be able to just type in "ignore russ" if I wanted
to not see his responses anymore in BBS.
(using russ as an example only)

response 58 of 299:

Mar 30 01:27 UTC 2005

Maybe newuser could set that by default if someone enters a birthdate that's
after 1990.

response 60 of 299:

Mar 30 02:57 UTC 2005

might as well have a universal ignore then , ignore xyz to ignore xyz on bbs
, party ,telegram and talk requests.

response 62 of 299:

Mar 30 06:48 UTC 2005

Re: #55. Whooo! 

You know, you really can't blame stupid people for being stupid.
Unfortunately.

response 64 of 299:

Mar 30 16:35 UTC 2005

re #58
Maybe we could advocate throwing Catcher in the Rye into a bonfire, too.

response 66 of 299:

Mar 30 17:59 UTC 2005

AHAHA THE POINT WAS THAT RUSS IS A PAEDOPHILE
"

AHAHAHA

THAT"S


OH GOD

response 68 of 299:

Mar 30 20:16 UTC 2005

The question came up earlier about how many people use the conferences,
or Agora in particular, as a proportion of the total Grex user base. 
Mabye some tools already exist for generating relevant data, but I don't
know where to find them, so I wrote a couple of my own that might be
useful.  I'm sure they can be improved on; any local shell script
hackers are welcome to have at 'em.

The following commands are in the directory ~remmers/bin:

    confstats   -number of items, responses, and distinct responders
                 in a conference
    confusers   -list number of responses by all or a selected set of 
                 users in a conference (Regardless of what you're
                 thinking, the name "confusers" stands for "conference
                 users".)
    at-least-10-logins-in-march
                -a command with a silly name that displays the number
                 of users who logged into Grex at least 10 times during
                 March 2005.

To save you the trouble of running that last command, which takes some
time, I'll report that at this writing the number of users who logged in
at least 10 times in March is 947.  (That might include a small number
of administrative accounts that aren't really people, but I don't think
that's significant.)  I chose a threshhold of 10 because it's the first
2-digit number and also because there are a lot of people who go through
newuser to check out the system, log in only once or a handful of times,
and then never come back.  So they're not really users.  On the other
hand, if someone logs in 10 or more times, I think it's likely that
they've found something to do here.

So anyway, about 1000 real users, give or take a bit.

The "confstats" command gives you statistics on a conference.  You have
to give the actual directory name of the conference as an argument, e.g.
"agora53" (for the current Agora) instead of "agora".  The command

    ~remmers/bin/confstats agora52

(that would be winter agora) gives the output

    # items:       259
    # responses: 12960
    # talkers:     170

The number of "talkers" is the number of distinct logins who entered at
least one response.  It might be reasonable to subtract off people who
made only one or two responses, but I didn't do that.  Estimating the
number of "readers" is problematic due to the fact that no central
records are kept of those, and it's possible to read anonymously.

Maybe this says that about 15% of active Grex users participate in
Agora.  Maybe less, if you subtract off one-time-only responders.

Compare this to an Agora from 6 years ago:

    ~remmers/bin/confstats agora22

    # items:       132
    # responses:  9492
    # talkers:     262

A telling comparison.  Roughly half as many items 6 years ago, but
significantly higher average number of responses per item, and a whole
lot more people participating in the conversations.  The base of Agora
participants appears to have shrunk significantly.

The "confusers" takes a conference and a list of login id's as arguments
and gives you the number of responses by each of those users in the
conference.  Or if you just specify a conference, it lists responses by
all users in alphabetical order.  Example for the current Agora:

    ~remmers/bin/confusers agora53 other remmers scott

    18  other
    8  remmers
    20  scott

Because they're too long for a response, I've saved the all-users lists
in my web directory, sorted in descending order of number of responses.

    http://cyberspace.org/~remmers/winter-agora.txt
    http://cyberspace.org/~remmers/spring-agora.txt

Well, I hope somebody finds something useful to do with these tools in
terms of gauging where Grex is and where it's headed.

response 70 of 299:

Mar 30 21:44 UTC 2005

It does appear that wtmp is not logging account usage via Backtalk. 
Remmers, how can your script account for those who are active users but
who primarily (or nearly exclusively) use Grex to conference via http?

response 72 of 299:

Mar 30 23:52 UTC 2005

Wow - thanks for these new tools, John!

response 74 of 299:

Mar 31 01:29 UTC 2005

Did you take into account the multiple personalities?