I started looking at Grex's web pages the other day.

Wow.

You really get a sense of how neglected the system has become when you
starting look at the web site.  There are all sorts of crazy references
to things that had happened in the mid-90's like they were yesterday,
and many things have not been updated in a very, very long time.  The
HTML is old and non-conforming to current standards.  Content is
scattered all over the place and mixed with presentation in an awkward
way.

A couple of years ago, we had a contest to create a new web site with
updated content and presentation.  The prize was a one-year membership.
 Exactly one user submitted an entry, and won, but I don't recall
whether we ever added him as a user.  We certainly didn't use his final
product.  As far as I can tell, he no longer has an account, either. 
But I had saved his work, and spent some time yesterday massaging it
into Grex's setup.  The result can be seen by pointing your web browser
at http://www.grex.org or http://www.cyberspace.org.  About a week or
so ago, I also bought an SSL certificate for Grex from GoDaddy.com, so that
that annoying `This certificate is not valid... blah blah blah' error message
no longer appears when you try to navigate to an https link on Grex.  (You all
*do* use SSL when you type your password into backtalk, right?)

I also started making a stab at updating our "Staff Notes" pages to
reflect what Grex is now (our web site still says that Grex is running
on a Sun!  This hasn't been true for years now).

However, I am but one person, and I also am, shall we say, "graphic arts
challenged."  I need some help.  Naturally, I'd try and enlist our
webmasters, but they seem to have disappeared.  It looks like we need
new webmasters.

Can you help?  Yes, you.  No, really, you reading this right now.

I can do a lot of the grunt work of converting old HTML to XHTML,
putting in some style-sheet files and the like, but I need help updating
content and making things look pretty.

This is but one of several projects I think we need to embark upon to
revitalize Grex.  Aside from the one broken window of the website, there
are a number of other things we really need to do.  Among them:

1. Replace Picospan with something open source.  No, really; we need
   to do a system upgrade, for instance, and it's going to be
   challenging to get an updated Picospan since we don't have source.
   If we are going to keep using it, we need to get the source code
   from somewhere (I personally doubt anyone would care if we started
   passing it around), but I think that's really unlikely to happen.
   Thus, we need to replace it: either by fixing up fronttalk and
   removing the major remaining bugs, or by writing a new replacement.
2. Consolidate much of the administrative scripts and where
   they get their data from, and make sure these reflect reality.
3. Put a new face on the website (already mentioned).
4. A lot of general cleanup of old data that's floating around the
   system.
5. Mail.  Ugh.  Yeah.
6. More work on sandboxing new users.
7. Web server *configuration* changes: I really think we need to move
   to a model where we sandbox personal web sites like we do email,
   to prevent phishing sites, and we also need to start allowing images
   for users.
8. Some administrative tools making it easier to move users between
   "classes."
9. Really, we just need people to do the work....

Those are the big ones I can think of right now.

Can you help, or do you know someone who can?

109 responses total.

Man, the new site is definitely a step up. Even the hardware and
software page has been updated. Kudos to the person responsible for the
design and kudos to you as well, cross.

good job

Thanks!  But no need to thank me; this should have happened long ago.

Some more things we need to do: upgrade OpenBSD.  We're about a year or
so out of date, and there will be some issues coming up in early August
that we've got to deal with that would be mitigated (to a large extent)
by a system update.

I'll start looking into it.

Here's another: Here's an idea for what I think Grex should be:

Grex should be a container for a set of communities.  It occurred to me
the other day that, really, there's nothing preventing something like
Grex and something like M-Net running on the exact same machine.  Except
the limitations of the software that we have built.  That is, there's
exactly one BBS instance, exactly one party instance, etc.  However, we
can generalize the software so that we have multiple of both,
effectively leading to multiple communities.

Think about it: we already do something similar.  The vast, vast
majority of users who login to grex never use BBS or party or anything
similar.  They are, in effect, in another community; we just don't
formalize this because they don't use the tools that the Grex founders
intended them to use.  But why *not* formalize it?  Why *not* provide
them tools to create new, totally separate communities?  Technically,
this isn't that hard, when you get down to it.

Basically, I'd think that the big challenges would be simply to separate
instances of party, the BBS, backtalk, etc, and make them selectable
based on the user's preferences.  This shouldn't be that hard, really.

Some other potential projects:

1. A new backtalk interface with key bindings and more AJAX'y type stuff
that allows for a swifter user experience.  Wouldn't something like the
GMail interface for BBS be pretty cool?

2. A client/server version of the venerable party, with channels for
supporting different pools of users.  Maybe we could just use IRC....

3. More services on the web.  Wouldn't it be cool to have an AJAX
interface to party?

What do others think?

I am not sure exactly what you mean by allowing users to make their own
communities but it sounds like a nice idea. 

Basically, providing some mechanism whereby a user can create a
community; this community has its own BBS, its own party, etc.  Then
oter users on the system can join said community.

Think of it as another level of abstraction on top of what we currently
have; Grex as we know it would become one community, but there would be
others on the system as well.

What about replacing the party system with IRC? Like, a local ircd 
server that everyone can access? That would allow for multiple 
communities.

There were system resource issues related to preventing this before but
they are no longer the case.

IRC 
EGGDROP

Let's open this baby up

The best way to "revitalize" GREX is of course to attract new users.  This is
by far the best "old style" BBS out there.  I love that I can dial in on my
286 and impress everyone with its "interneting" ability!

There is a list of dial-in BBS's still in operation, and GREX is nowhere to
be found on said list.  I would suggest that whoever is in charge shoot him
an E-mail and ask to be added, as it would attract a lot of new members.

The address of the website is www.dmine.com/dialbbs/dialbbs.html

resp:6 I've thought about it, and think that could work.  There was some
 resistance to it years ago, but maybe now would be different; it's 
unclear.

resp:8 I looked at that website, but it appears that they want dial-in 
*only* BBS's on that list.  However, they have a link to a "telnet" list
 that I submitted Grex to.  We'll see; it would be nice if it would drum
up  some new users.

The grexergallery site is  gone . so probablythat link can be removed 
Great job on the website !

 If it's still active, perhaps put a link to the Grex Flickr group in place
 of the grexergallery link.

I wouldn't be too excited about getting rid of Picospan or
Backtalk/Fronttalk as it is what has attracted most of us here.  If new
interfaces can be made which let the existing users continue to use the
system as we're accustomed to using it, that would be interesting.

I kind of like the idea of separate communities.  It has been possible
for a long time to have multiple Picospan type BBSes on the same
computer.  A couple of users, including Jared Mauch, installed their own
copy of YAPP on M-Net back in the 1990s.  We discouraged it then because
of space limitations but it was possible.  I expect it should still be
possible now for Backtalk/Fronttalk though it would take a root some
manual work to set it up.  There'd be no technical problem with other
software packages pointing to different communities as far as I know.

I too like the new WWW interface.

I got a "The page cannot be found" for www.dmine.com/dialbbs/dialbbs.html

I approve of modernizing the website to use current standards.  In
particular, I'm happy to see that the homepage Dan set up uses CSS and
is "real" XHTML (i.e. MIME type "application/xhtml+xml").  I'm not all
that fond of the appearance (tiny fonts, dull colors, Grex logo missing)
but those are things that are easy enough to tweak.  For comparison
purposes, the old homepage can be viewed at
http://grex.org/index.html.no-wnu .  I actually think the old one wins
on readability and attractiveness; YMMV.

Whatever website design we decide that we like, we'd want it to be
consistent throughout the site.  I'm thinking that a good move would be
to use a full-blown content management system (CMS).  Of course, we'd
want one that's free, open-source, and facilitates easy modification of
content as well as tailoring the appearance to what we want (i.e.
something with a "Grexish" look, whatever that is).  I've not worked
with any CMSs, so I'm not familiar with what's available, or with the
advantages and disadvantages of different products.  Drupal seems to be
getting a lot of buzz nowadays; maybe that would meet our needs.  Once a
CMS is in place, folks could go to work bringing the content up-to-date.
 Using a popular CMS project might also encourage new folks familiar
with the product to get involved in maintaining the website.  Hence I
suggest the following

PROJECT:  Make Grex's website CMS-based.

resp:11; Huh.  That could work.  Or maybe we could just host the
grexergallery on Grex itself.  Personally, I'm getting to the point
where I think we need to change the access structure so that only our
"community validated" users can

resp:12 Well, the idea isn't to do away with conferencing as we know it,
but rather to replace the picospan program itself with something compatible and
open source.  If YAPP were open source, that would be the obvious choice, but
it is not and it doesn't appear that the Thaler's are going to open it up any
time soon (though if someone asked them, that'd be nice).

There are certainly no plans to replace the backtalk/fronttalk combination
any time soon, though it may be feasible to replace picospan with fronttalk.

resp:14 I'm sorry you don't like the color scheme; actually, I didn't
change it at all from the submitted website.  I confess I rather like it, but
then, asthetic tastes vary.  Well, maybe "like" is too strong of a word.  I do
think that it looks nice, though.

I am not, in principle, opposed to using a CMS, though I do not want to
become hamstrung in by waiting on the "right" technical solution when what
we need *right now* is a major update.  I think this is a potentially
useful long-term project, but right now, let's focus on getting what we
have into the 21st century and reflecting reality.

Btw: John, does this mean that you are volunteering to work on the website?
:-)

resp:15 (First paragraph; neglectfully unfinished....)  ...only our
"community validated" users can create web sites.  Concurrently, we
should just allow images.

We have always feared we would be either a) overutilized in terms of
disk, bandwidth, etc if we allowed images, or b) be overrun with phishing
and porn sites.  I don't think we have any evidence to assume either is
true, though.

Re resp:15 - I was aware that the color choices were not yours.  I
wasn't all that fond of them the first time I saw them either.  In any
case, they're easy to change.

I'm thinking that installing a CMS like Drupal might represent a day's
work for somebody, and then everything would be in place for people to
start contributing content through a well-defined process that would not
require extensive technical skills and that would ensure everything
would have a uniform appearance.  Not having worked with CMSs, I can't
say for certain that it would be that simple, though.  Developing
standard "Grexian" CSS and then requiring that all pages use it might be
a simpler way to get to the 21st century.  Maybe somebody who's reading
this and has had CMS experience could provide useful input regarding
what a CMS would buy us and how much work would be involved in setting
it up.

No, I'm not volunteering to work on the website.

I dont mind working on the website but my web skills are somewhat
lacking. 

What I am getting good at though is testing things. I do a lot of the
quality control for the web designers at work

What's that involve? Viewing the same page with five different browsers?
Proofreading for typos?

In Grex's case, since it is pretty simple, that is pretty much what it
entails. That and checking every link. At work, it is somewhat more
complex because we have massive databases feeding data to the site and
all kinds of weird filters and stuff. 

resp:17 Cool.  If we can find someone to do the work, we can make it
happen. It does sound interesting.  While you have said that you haven't worked
with the software yourself, do you know of anyone close to Grex who has a proof
of concept site running?

resp:21 The big things I think we need to work on right now are content
(and frankly, anyone can do that) and utilizing current web standards.  The
latter isn't so hard; we can use tools like HTML tidy to automate most of it. 
The former is where we need people who are sufficiently familiar with Grex that
they can describe it reasonably well and, more importantly, good at writing and
with something of an eye for design.  Actually, we only need one person who's
decently good at design to do the CSS part, and then the rest of the pages more
or less inherit that, so mostly we need people who are good at word-smithing
and working on the content part.

And we also need people to advertise and cheerlead for Grex.

Not until my name is on the front page.

RE:13 
Oops, I mistyped the URL its www.dmine.com/dialbbs/dialbbs.htm not html sorry
for the screw up

I generally am not very relevant in this discussion but I'm posting this
anyway.

CMSs are "certainly" not the way for Grex to go. Their functions only slightly
overlap with those of Grex's and despite what remmers says they are far from
being "easy to maintain." They are almost invitations for disaster because
they're too complex, often involve many "moving parts," and mostly hinge on
"shiny new technology" instead of "proven old ways."

A simple CMS package will need heavy server-side (e.g. PHP, Perl) and
client-side scripting, some sort of database (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL), and
"mods" for the web server (e.g. mod_php for Apache). These are obvious
performance drains and security threats. Grex is known (and loved for) being
simple and "old-skool." Some Grex users delibrately use very minimal setups and
view these same pages through lynx (or through bbs), with those "frills"
they'll be deterred. I like it when pagefuls of good talk is loaded over my
dial-up connection in under 15 seconds.

On the functional aspect, Grex offers a bundle: shell access, email,
webhosting, "and" community interaction. CMSs are focused only on collaborative
content creation which is not the sort of community interaction Grexers are
involved in. Grex isn't hosting some sort of "project" that needs
"collaboration," i.e. modification of the "same" content. Its community
interaction paradigm is very well described by the title it already has: bbs.
The refurbishment it needs in that respect is probably some new "light"
bulletin board software but I'd be skeptic to even deploy phpBB and the like
because all of them, like CMSs, depend on server-side scripting and DBMSs.

As for "standards compliance," as far as I know most "recent versions" of
standards have been specifically designed to be supersets of their previous
versions. So Grex is not non-standard if it still presents content in old HTML
instead of some blasted XHTML/DTHML 4.1-bloody-transitional. In fact, one has
to be proud to present a functional Grex using the smallest possible subset of
the pertinent standards. That's good minimalism.

I believe on a "frills-mostly-with-a-bit-of-content" Internet a good ol'
system's mission should be to keep up the good ol' ways. In case of Grex, that
could be accomplished by enriching the shell/remote access experience (for me
that boils down to port forwarding and running httptunnel ;-), expanding (or
total abandoning) of email services (to include IMAP, for example), relaxing
webhosting practice so that people can make diverse websites within reason (I
don't think people should be able to put up sites written in PHP on Grex,
though), and a more capable but still "text-oriented" bbs (a "multi-level
forum" structure instead of conferences, and a proper linkable archive).

Good luck to [put the hero's name here] who will revive Grex. Seriously though,
I'll be happy to help if there's something I can do for Grex over some
thousands of kilometers and a dial-up connection.

Perhaps fronttalk could be changed so that you can click on a link posted in
bbs, and use lynx or links to view it (no graphics).

Re resp:25 - Hmm.  I'll need to educate myself better on CMS's before I
can agree or disagree with what you say.  As far as the underlying
plumbing is concerned - Perl and MySQL we already have, and intelligent
use of CSS and PHP could substantially improve the website.  I've found
that adding some light-weight CSS and PHP to my personal website has
significantly simplified maintenance tasks.  I'm in favor of reasonable
minimalism and avoiding technological overkill, but not to the point of
rejecting technologies that could be useful and make our jobs easier.

Re resp:26 - Adding mouse support to a tty interface is an interesting
concept, but probably not feasible (although xterm has limited support
for it, I think).  On the other hand, implementing a web interface that
looks and acts substantially like the tty interface, but also supports
"clicking", might have some appeal to the old guard.  Not that I'm
seriously suggesting that it be done.

You don't need a mouse to click on a link.  Pine lets you go to URLs already
(Enter key).  Why not fronttalk also letting you invoke lynx or links or even
w3m?  

Ah, gotcha - "selecting" might be a less confusing term than "clicking",
which suggested to me that you meant a real point-and-click device
(mouse).  Well, it's definitely feasible technically; stumbling block
would be, as usual, persuading someone with the necessary programming
skills to implement it.

My Enter key clicks.

resp:28 I'm not sure what the point would be....  Grex already has 
fronttalk that works with a TTY interface.  One of the ideas is to 
make the web interface more TTY like, but that's a separate issue.

The point would be to make it easier in Fronttalk to follow web links
that people post, similar to a mechanism that already exists in Pine. 
That would actually be a nice facility to add, if somebody gets inspired
to do it, and underscores why Grex really needs to be running open
source conferencing software.

I wouldn't mind a web interface to BBS which supports cellphone users.

resp:32 Aha.  Okay.  It strikes me that both picospan and fronttalk 
pipe conference data (read: responses) through an external pager 
program; I wonder if less or most of any of those can be made to 
recognize URLs and do something similar to what pine does.  If that 
were the case, we could just set the pager and get the same 
functionality for free.

The new page looks nice. A couple of typos: "frequently" needs an "l."
"Our home, Ann Arbor" needs a space.

Thank you!  I corrected both typos; please let us know if you see any more!

Re #27:

I'm rather bewildered to hear Grex runs a SQL server. Are there any Grex
applications depdendent on it? Has it ever been load tested? Or is it just
"educational?"

As for Perl, mere availability of the interpreter is not enough. PerlCGI
modules must be added to both Perl and Apache (assuming Grex is served on
Apache) to provide the required CGI hooks. These hooks and the "possibility" of
remotely running malicious code through a misconfigured or buggy CGI interface
will make Grex vulnerable to a host of attacks. On the other hand, cgi-bin is
already there so perhaps there won't be much added vulnerability.

I've heard computer security experts have a saying that goes, "usability is
inversely proportional to security." I wonder if Grex isn't already "useful"
enough?.

The front page is too cool. But the same theme is not followed in all
pages. It should be consistent in all pages as remmers mentioned. I
would like to help you in always I can. I can read/write HTML, CSS,
little PHP and Perl.

Thanks
Noorul

resp:37 I've found it's not always true that security and usability 
are inversely proportional.  For instance, many networks become *more* 
usable when moving to, e.g., Kerberos for authentication because it 
suddenly becomes transparent to most users: instead of entering a 
password/passphrase for a variety of different services, the library 
just pulls it out of your credentials cache on your behalf.  Similarly 
with SSH public-key authentication.

Btw: Grex runs MySQL for a few different, administrative types of 
things.  We also already run mod_perl.

resp:38 Thanks!  That'd be great!  All of the HTML is 
in /var/www/htdocs; feel free to copy that to your directory and go to 
town making changes that you see fit.  I agree that the pages should 
have a consistent look and feel, but haven't had time to update most 
of them myself.

I *did* convert the HTML in the main directory to XHTML using tidy, 
but it's being servied up by Apache as text/html instead of the 
XML+XHTML combo that all the kids love.  That's largely a matter of 
fixing links.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss