The board had mentioned a while back about having a "town hall" meeting,
but that would generally only be for those who can come in person.  So,
to fill in that gap, we thought it would be good to have an item that
will stay around as agora get rolled. So, here it is.

What we want to do is get opinions about how Grex can move forward, what
we can do to encourage more people to use it, and what we want Grex to
provide in terms of services or applications.

Some of these questions have come up in other items, but we'd like to
pull them all into here and develop a plan for Grex to move beyond where
it is today.  Now that we've had 6 months or more to try to get Grex
going again, it is time to see what else we can do beyond making it more
stable and reliable and adding more staff to take care of issues in a
timely manner.

357 responses total.

What is happening with the two phone lines?

One of them will be discontinued.

And we'll monitor the remaining one to see how much it gets used.

BTW, Board meeting minutes, which document this decision on phone
lines are available in the coop conference in item 279. 

I want Grex to attract new members, which it is not doing and has not
been doing since the validation patch was put in eliminating a fully
open newuser.  Today's internet has far too many things to do for most
people to have the patience to wait around for some staff member to
'validate' them and confer that they are good enough to participate here.

The validation patch should be removed and then Grex needs to discuss
ways it can publicize itself and attract more people here.  Grex needs
to use some of its funds to let people know its around and its cool.  I
recall some years ago Grex used to sponsor a movie night at one of the
outdoor movie things they had in A2, even gave out keychains or pins or
something there one year.  Grex can also better publicize itself through
youtube, facebook, twitter .etc  

set up an IRC server
set up a newsgroup server
set up a gopher server

these retro services will attract the only people who really care about 
unix places like this anyway.  Hippy nerds chowing down on granola and 
trail mix.

re #6
I would only be for IRC if people are forced to telnet to port 6669 and
use it manually..none of that remote mIrc or BitchX GUI client stuff.
Newsgroup and IRC is all about p2p file xfer anymore...waste of bandwidth.

Maybe gopher will make a comeback?  Hmmm...
 
The idea of a retro system has been tossed around a bit.  It is one
way to go and one thing we can continue to do (text conferencing, for
example).  We could do more retro things, of course.  Along this line,
installing more programming languages, debuggers, databases, and other
apps that can be run or used at the command line might attract some new
users (even if they aren't "retro").

GUI apps tend to use too many system resources for a small multi-user
system.  Perhaps if we got a better system...

Becoming a member of Grex gets you access to more features, like
outgoing access.  BitchX and ircII are available, for example, if you
are a verified (not validated) member.  These are command line programs.

I don't know that being only a retro system will attract a large
community of new users willing to become members, though.  We're more
likely to attract new users with newer means of communication or at
least a fresher interface to the conferences and email.  And of course,
we'd need a more open new user policy than what we have now.  The
latter assumes the system can be set up so that juvenile twits don't
cause frequent issues. Being destructive is so much easier than being
constructive...

Not everyone wants to use Facebook or Myspace or Twitter.

  
the towonhall idea is a goo done and if we could get non-local partipsipation
it wold be even better.
  
the meeting wold hae to be a tad more controlled/discipliend than just
a ppl-ftf-gathering thogh.

woth tonsters confernce call facility, and one of my amps, the 
assemble multitude could partipsipate from .. oh,,,, paki/afgh/engl/japan
or wherever.
  
thoughts?

Grex needs to start allowing graphics in its conferencing posts.  
Everyone who blogs or conferences these days uses pictures and such.  

In addition backtalk needs to be changed to start allowing posts to be 
edited.  In most other places you post on the internet, you are given 
the chance to retroactively edit your entries at least for a short 
period after posting if you choose.  Here you make a typo or a mistake 
in a post you have to delete the whole thing.  

Allowing graphics in the conferences? Well, I guess 4chan.org is pretty
popular too.

Sadly, "/b/ isn't your personal army." /g/, however, can promise users to
break new ground in raid organization and allow libertarian militias to roam

> Here at Grex, Everybody Gets Their Own Personal Army [of One]

Ow sh*t I forgot the ;-)

I like the idea of editing posts. If we had someone who could change
backtalk reliably, we'd be in business for that as long as there were no
policy reason against editing (I'd assume if each user owns their own
responses such that they could delete them, they should also be able to
edit them).  I've seen on some systems where a note is added to the post
to indicate when it was edited so that readers know it has been changed.

I'm not sure about the graphics.  It would be neat in some respects,
but as soon as someone starts posting images that will get Grex in
trouble with the law, then we'd need to start moderating responses,
which doesn't sound good.

Can you already link to images at other sites?

Obviously, you can cut and paste links to other sites in a conference
response but the conferencing software doesn't interpret those links to,
say, display an image.

re #14
 I like the idea of editing posts.

That's called CENSORSHIP.

The only issue I can see with allowing users to edit their previous
posts is that sooner or later some troublemaker is going to go edit it
their posts in such a way as to make it seem like responses to the
original post were in response to the original post. 

I might enter an item entitled 'HOw many joints have you smoked this
year?' and most everyone will say zero. Then I could change it to 'How
many times have you had sex this year?' har har. But people could make
others look dumb. The only solution would be to cut and paste the
original post into the response which opens up a whole nuther can of
worms. 

Hmm...editing your own words?  I guess deleting your response is
censorship then?  Censorship is done by others to your words, not by you
to your own words (unless you want to call it self-censorship, but as
the owner of your own words you can do what you want with them).

What should we do then?  Put back all the posts that people deleted
because they were owner?

re 17: Maybe some of us like censorship you hippy!

This response has been erased.

See?  I need to edit #21.  I guess I should delete it and enter it
again.  What a pain.

The thing is, if you can delete your own response and enter it again
in edited form, then you've well...edited it.  Why not make that one
step instead of two?

When you do it that way, it is very clear which responses occurred
before the edit and which after. 

re #20
Once the censors are allow then all tha twill be left ar Roman tax cllecorsz!

editing can be allowed for a short time after posting (say an hour or two)
and after that the only way left would be to delete and re-enter.

  
wb sholmes ... good #26 . bu ti;d limit the edit capability until there is
anohter repsonse following .... following resp might refer to prev and then
alowng edit of prev WoulD lead to endless confusion.

re #26 Yeah many boards that are out there let people edit posts for up
to an hour or two after the post was made.  I know that when Backtalk
was first installed that Janc, who wrote it, said the edit function was
in the program, that he wanted to have it as a function, but that staff
objected to its use on grex just as they had objected years earlier to
having an edit function with picospan which clearly could have been
done. It seems the objection was that it would give too much power to
the trolls.  If grex was like a newspaper, well once the newspaper is
printed you can't edit an article that is in it. When you hit 'enter'
you are in effect publishing your post just like an article.  I think
giving posters a window of time to edit their posts is not going to
empower trolls.

Another thing that could be done to get more users to Grex is a
web-based party/chat program.  I'm one of the few left on here who
remembers when the 'Party' program, Grex's chat program, was a vital
part of Grex.  It used to be a place where people gathered day and night
to interact in real time.  Unfortunately grex's party program is not
used anymore because it is only accessible via telnet or dial-in and
nobody telnets or dials in anymore.  It is now a useless program.  I
want to see a web based chat program.

This is nothing that hasn't been discussed before.  One could have been
put in back when backtalk was installed as part of the programming.  But
again then staff objected it would bring too much traffic to grex and
anybody who wanted to chat could telnet or dial in and use the old
program.  Times have changed.  You either take a chance on these things
or whats the point of continuing?  I would love to see a web-based chat
service on Grex.  I believe that when Party died on Grex it hastened the
dying of Grex altogether.

bellstar is a trip,I wish his ass would come back to m-net

What I had suggested for editing was that a note could be added to the
post to show that it had been edited (e.g. when the last edit occurred,
as multiple edits would be possible in the time window).  Thus the
objection to not knowing a post had been edited can be worked around.

Allowing a period of time for edits is also a reasonable idea.  That
would allow people to take care of typos.  Later the only choice would
be to delete the entire response. Or at least, that's one way we could
implement editing.

Encouraging trolls?  How about encouraging participation?  How about we
try some ideas and see how they work?  Right now we're just coasting
along and griping.

Web-based chat sounds interesting to me, as well.  I don't think we are
as bound by bandwidth or system resource issues as we were 10 years ago.
As always, aside from having a clear idea of how we'd want that to work,
we'd also need someone to implement it.  

If we are fortunate enough to attract many new users, we can talk
about improving the hardware to support applications that are using
significant system resources.

Try to find ways to make things work.  Don't try so hard to shoot down
ideas.

just need to a bbs that uses php...vbulletin or some shit like that

There's modifying our current bbs and there's switching to something
else.  Both should be considered, I think.  In the short term we might
need to go with modifications to backtalk, but if we had someone with
the expertise to install and set up a new conferencing system, we'd have
a better chance of trying that out.  Anyway, it sounds like something we
could experiment with, if only to see how it looks and operates, and how
much maintenance is involved.

(NB:  grex's users, not its staff, have objected to the editing of posts
and other 'improvements.')

Users or members?  And just objections or a member vote?  How
many did not object?

It was not a vote.  There has been extensive discussion of the matter
over the years.  Richard remembers "the staff" objecting, and I remember
just about everyone objecting.

No big deal.  The question is, "What do people want to do _now_?"

I have a feeling a lot of these improvements will not be as bad as some
people think, especially since we really don't have much participation
in the conferences and we're holding new users back with a validation
requirement (and probably chasing many away before they ever give Grex a
real try).

Something like editing responses could be implemented and tried out and
if it is a huge issue (which I doubt), it could be taken back out (or
turned off) later.  It perhaps could be made optional in the user's
setup if they object to it so much.  It says a lot about the Grex users
that they refuse to even try. This situation has chased more than one
user away.

If we decide to cater to a small group of vocal users who want to keep
things as they were in the past we potentially lose the opportunity to
gain new users looking for something other than a bbs from 20 years ago.
One option would be to present the old interface to those who want it
and a different interface to those who want something newer in terms of
features and appearance.  I don't know how possible that is given our
current programming resources, but it's something to consider. 

Or cyberspace communications could start a second (fresh) system for 
conferencing.  It would live in the cloud and not be encumbered by old 
software and old rules. This version would remain and we could see how it 
goes for both of them.

resp:37 One thing I would ask for if responses are allowed to be edited
would be for the ability to use blockquote tags in order to quote things
I am responding to. 

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