response 10 of 10:

Jun 5 20:44 UTC 2018

Indeed, it would be nice to see a productive way forward for Grex. I try and
get (non-destructive) members of the hacker community to sign up for a shell
account. I don't know how many do.

I've done several small projects that involved giving people free accounts
on various kinds of systems, most of it is vintage computer related, or
accounts on obscure OSes that people wanted to play with (e.g. VMS, ULTRIX,
etc). I've helped a few people set up oldschool BBSes (dialin as well as
telnet). People would initially sign up, goof around for a while, and then
stop using the system. I'm not sure how to keep people engaged.

We've talked about extending one of my small forums projects (hbb, Hacker BBS)
to include CLI/dialin BBS functionality, with the idea that maybe people would
continue using it if they had the *option* of using a web forum frontend, but
also interacting with the other interfaces at will. IIRC, that's what we sort
of already have here (I don't know, I use the CLI `bbs` interface).

Part of the attraction of Grex, to me, when starting out, was having a
UNIX-like system that someone else managed. I'm not sure I'm representative
of the typical potential Grex user, though.

(I do still read the BBS, I'm just mostly in lurk mode nowadays!)