I have been told, Grex had an awesome Gopher server at one time. What happened
to it? I see there is a Gopher client, and it points to quux.org ( think?)
rather than alot pointing to floodgap's gopherhole. It would be nice to have
a Gopher server here, maybe like SDF offering gohper hosting? Een better
though, imo - would be a shared gopher server. A collaborative gopherhole.
Is anybody still interested in gopher here? What do you think of a grex
gopher server? 

79 responses total.

I see it as one more thing we don't have time to administer myself, and
I'd question if we could even build it at this point, considering the
overall state of the system.

Hi tonster,
There seem to be two questions now:
How difficult would it be to administer a gopher server here on grex?
What is the overall state of the system?

I gave up gopher holes.

The overall state of the system is bad, frankly. We're many
years behind on upgrading the basic OS and frankly we want
to move to FreeBSD anyway.

But I'm not sure what the appeal of a gopher server would be?
Aside from a certain "retro" thing, Gopher's pretty much gone
by the wayside....

I'd be more interested in a usenet newsreader like back in tha day

  /usr/local/bin/slrn

There is a community of Gopher fans keeping the protocol alive, though it is
admittedly a very small niche. In addition to its retro appeal, Gopher allows
very lightweight clients and servers and appeals to people who think the WWW
was spoiled by embedded graphics. It also serves as a darknet for sharing
files off the Web.

Gopher does have much going for it, if people knew about it. It concentrates
your mind on the material you are reading, or searched for; instead of the
fluff, which is alot of hip web design. The web is as much about what it looks
like as what it is; where really content 'should' be king. 
I think having another option, other than WWW, for hypertext content on the
internet is a good thing. I can see how the web killed gopher, but i really
think many people are tired of the web when it comes to certain types of
material. Look at me: someone who switched on a computer fro the first time
in 2007 ( i think?), and here i am beating the path less trod (these days).
I am eternally grateful nobody showed me how to use the PC i bought when i
got internet and had to get aquanted with computers; otherwise i would maybe
be stuck in a Micros*ft controlled matrix, where venturing off any well trod
paths is punishable by excommunication.
Anyway: one nice thing would, along with a webpage, to have a gopher page,
and or, a gopher blog. :) 
I'm not asking directly for this right now; just thought it a nice idea to
have the topic broached, and wondered how feasable it was for the future.
Gopher hasn't died, it really is still here. (when i get round to setting up
my own gopher server, it would be nice if it could be listed on Grex.org's
much better gopher hub ;) 

See if you can run it now.  I don't know if it will connect to anything
or.

not :)

i would use a gopherspace here on grex. i'm a big fan and currently am trying
to leave w3/html behind. this includes of course replacing my http home with
a script that simply formats my gopherspace & phlog to the most minimal
hypertext possible. anyway i think the number of us interested in doing such
a thing is growing, especially as the w3c's concern for user rights is
shrinking. see http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw for great example of
how gopher can be visible to w3 users ... i recommend gopher://sdf.org as
a test uri to enter. i think the demand for a non-commercial(izable) protocol
is going to increase as even non-savvy end-users notice their freedoms
dwindling on the w3 specs to come. some speak of potential secure gopher, other
such oddities ... i argue that gopher is perfect as is, and any modifications
that need to be done can be done through the way it's retrieved via w3 (the
protocol that won, for now anyway, it has won and that is that). in the unix
philosophy sense, i speak. gopher is perfect. it does exactly what it is
supposed to do, and no more and no less. i'll note that i'm more interested in
maintaining and cultivating the user base here at grex than i am in
implementing a new protocol instance, but should sensible priorities permit, i
would certainly make very serious use of a grex gopherspace.

I have spoken with a few members of Grex.org who are very into gopher. SO ther
is a group of us who might be able to contribute in some way to this. 

Another reason to recommend gopher, is it looks georgous on mobile devices.
Have you seen the overbite client on android (aswell as firefox)?
http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/sc?android   
It looks even better - for real - on my smartphone (which only has a small
screen compared to most peoples). It is a dream to navigate, and on mobile
devices - i think you see the limitiations of the WWW design fashions we have
all been aquainted with. 

I guess I still don't quite see the appeal. I get that folks don't want to
get bogged down in the fluff of modern web "design", but that doesn't mean
that one has to author HTML that's all fluffy, or that one has to consume
web-based content with a graphical web browser. One could use `links`, or
`lynx`, or `w3m` or any number of text-only browsers to avoid most of the
garbage.

I mean, I don't have an objection to running a gopher server, but I still
don't understand the point. Most of the objections could be addressed through
other means.

The point is the same as the point in using a shell-based bulletin board
system when there is a web-based interface available.

As you mentioned in your post on SDF's BBOARD, a gopher server on Grex,
especially on with per-user gopherspace available, would be a feature that
would attract some new users to Grex, even if it's interesting to only a
minority of the user base.

Sure. The part I'm still struggling to understand is that the stated
reasons for wanting gopher (text, no ads, etc) aren't specific to
the gopher *protocol*, in the same way that a text-based BBS is
specific to using a text-based BBS. One can use a text-based browser
and get the same effect.  Grex's whole reason for existence was a
text-based BBS; the desire for gopher seems limited and mostly boils
down to, "it's not HTTP."

That said, I installed a gopher server package. I guess I'll have
to see about configuring it and getting it running.

I understand your point. I don't think people are interested in gopher because
it does anything that can't be achieved in HTTP by sticking to a spartan page
design aesthetic, but the freedom (from dreaded HTML) and simplicity in
publishing content with gopher. You can post your plain text documents as-is,
and a menu is little more than a list of file names an titles.

With gopher you don't have the option of getting fancy/complicated.

There is also a factor of nostalgia/curiosity for a road-not-taken in the
history of computing. A few different decisions in the early 1990s and we
might all be now using the World-Wide Gopherspace instead of the WWW.

I'm a fan. Check out my gopher at gopher://whitemesa.net for live space
weather reports and other stuff.

*shrug*

Okay, I guess it doesn't hurt anything. There's a gopher server running
on Grex now.

I cant get Veronica working on Archie..I feel like a Jughead

Veronica will only work on Archie if she thinks Betty is going to steal him
away from her.

Zoinks

excuse my ignorance, but how do we access the gopher server? I fire up the
gopher client and i get 'The gopher Project' server as the home server. How
do we go about adding content to the grex server? :)

I've written a quick-and-dirty introduction to Gopher for grexers:
 
~papa/public_gopher/README.1st
 
That should get you started. Feedback on the document is welcome.

P.S. Although the above file is accessible via Gopher, you can also read it
with cat, more, less, or your preferred file viewer.

Argh! I accidentally tossed my guide down the memory hole. 

The contents now are an earlier version. I will recreate the completed guide
over my lnch break.

The file is partially restored and now provides a hint for starting your
exploration of Gopherspace. More later.

Your a dancer Papa! :) I'm just off to have a look now. Thanks! :)

Nice gopherhole papa! I see the server now at: gopher://grex.org/  which
has no links to other servers as yet, but i am so happy to see an new gopher
server on the net \o/. It won't be long untill a few gopher sites link to grex,
for sure. Just one thing: it would be nice if we could start say the default
gopher client with gopher://grex.org/ and have links on there to the
other main servers etc... and maybe we could have a tutorial, for the complete
newcomer, on the grex server's main menu: great work!! :) 

A simple tutorial is my aim with the document linked above. It was nearly done
before my tragic encounter with the bit bucket. Let me know what you think
when I get it done.

I know cross doesn't want to invest a lot of time in the gopher server, but
it would be nice if gopher://grex.org pointed to a menu of at least
grexer gopherholes, like my file ~papa/public_gopher/grex-gs/gophermap

I don't know how to set the default site for the gopher client, but on an
individual basis you can set a bookmark in either gopher or lynx, or define
a shell alias like `alias gopher='gopher gopher://grex.org'`.

I sent a question to the Gopher Project mailing list to see if there's
anything we need to do to attract a visit from the Veronica indexing robot.

I've rebuilt and completed my tutorial for accessing Gopherspace. View the
file:

  ~papa/public_gopher/README.1st

You can also access the file with Gopher at the address:

  gopher://grex.org/0/~papa/README.1st

  (use your favorite Gopher client)

I've also created a tutorial for starting your own Grex gopherhole:

  gopher://grex.org/0/~papa/README.2nd

You can also access these files and other Gopherspace phenomena from my
gopherhole's main menu:

  gopher://grex.org/1/~papa

I've tried to make both tutorials as simple as possible for fellow grexers.
Please try them out and let me know how I did.

Tutorial for gophermap custom menus:

gopher://grex.org/1/~papa/gmap.txt

Let me be clear what I mean:

I *personally* don't want to put a lot of time and effort into
supporting  Gopher, but I'm certainly willing to take content and
marshal it over into the  gopher area, make changes to the server, etc.
If folks use gopher, and most  importantly if it becomes a draw that
pulls people into Grex then I'm fine  with it. If it doesn't, then I'll
take it down (it is, after all, yet another  unencrypted service running
on Grex that could become a security issue). But  if no one is using it,
then no one will notice. :-)

I'd be slightly more enthusiastic about a low-markup set of static blog
web  sites, to be totally honest. Gopher as a protocol is a lot less
interesting. A  gopher-style thing via HTTP, with minimalist content (a
la Markdown) that's  directly interpreted in lieu of HTML is a lot more
interesting.

I've created a script to open your own Grex gopherhole:

  ~papa/share/bin/mygh

The script uses the gopher client, or you can set you $GOPHER_CLIENT
environment variable if you prefer lynx.

Cool. Drop it into /cyberspace/contrib/bin ?

This response has been erased.

I didn't know about /cyberspace/contrib/bin. mygh is in there now. Are there
any guidelines on what's appropriate to put in there?

cross, could you add the following two lines at the bottom of
/var/gopher/gophermap ?
=== Start ...  ==========
Grexer gopherholes ...
~
=== ... End    ==========

That will put a list of links to Grex user ~/public_gopher directories at the
end of the Grex Gopher main page.

Done. Take a look.

But does that imply that the gopher server will try to stat(2) a subdirectory
of *every* user home directory on Grex each time someone fetches that page?

I looked at the source code and that's exactly what it does.

However, at the moment it doesn't appear to be an issue in terms of either
performance or resource consumption. Let's leave it for now. If it becomes
an issue later on down the road, we can revisit.

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