A few quick questions about gopher on grex.
First, do we have any kind of CGI available? If so, what languages can we use?
Second, how hard and fast are our quotas here on grex? I want to have a Gopher
version of the public domain Websters 1928 dictionary available through
gopher. I have the dictionary in a database, with permission from the creator
of the database to use it. As a database, it's a single file at about 16MB,
which isn't a problem; with some kind of cgi access that is. I also have the
contents of that DB broken out into text files in folders, for easy gopher
browser... but that equals about 62k files (broken into A-Z folders, and then
folders with the first two letters of the word under that.) Depending on how
much disk space a folder takes on grex, that might break the quota bank; and
the quota command shows a folder limit as well, which would be 6x broken.

Another option would be to drop it all in my SDF gopherhole, but the SDF
gopher server has been quite unreliable lately, so I hesitate to keep putting
content there.

Any thoughts?

10 responses total.

CGI, no; the gopher server runs as a single, global user. There's no good
way to get it to run a program as a particular user account, so any gopher
CGI could, by definition, muck with any other gopher CGI.

I'm still baffled by all this fascination with Gopher with HTTP is manifestly
better at this point, but if folks are having fun with it, then go for it.

Re: quotas, we've got hard and fast quotas and I think they stretch up to
something like 100MB. If you need more for some reason, let me/us know and
we can plus you up.

No CGI access? Is that correct?

My understanding is that the no-CGI rule is like the no-image-hosting
rule a hold-over from the era of excessively cautious administration of
Grex described by cross in the other item.

These rules have been informally relaxed at present on the condition
that the activity in question does not have a significant impact on the
security of the system.

Maybe reestablishing the community rule-making and governance process
should be a part of the effort to rebuild the user base.

There are plenty of places to do CGI and HTML.  Grex is not a soup kitchen.

So how do we get new users? What does work?

resp:5 Most things work, and it occurs to me that if you're verified
nothing is preventing you from running your own little web server on
some random port. That's what hashbang.sh is doing, for instance.

CGI/PMP/etc under nginx is a bit antiquated, but folks can do that
kind of thing if they want using ersatz web servers in Python, Go,
or even Haskell.

I did a lot of research yesterday and found there is a lot of "Free Shells"
out there. I'm trying to understand what Grex has (that works) I can put in
a Post or ad. These free service have a long long list of offerings. I don't
personally need CGI. But I'm sure "New Users" would want to have it. What
about PHP? Would they have access to that? Grex seems to have all or most of
the programing languages so to me that's a "draw". Just need to find the right
people.

Tell them Grex isn't pretty but it has a great personality.
Then when they get here we'll lock them in the back room and make them
fold laundry for food scraps.

They can have a slice of pizza and listen to our Tones On Tail while
we talk about our fathers and what it is like to be a hip woman

LOL! You just described my afternoon.

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