This item is for capturing opinions and ideas about how Grex can move
forward, what Grex can do to encourage more people to use the system,
and what we want Grex to provide in terms of services or applications.

334 responses total.

Was this meant for Agora?

Looks like a good place for it to me.

Of course, it might be nice were it linked back to coop.

  
baord meeting this evening .. The GREX board meeting  will
start at 6:30 p.m.  I hope that this timing will work better. Board
meetings are open to all.  

Yes, this item was meant for agora (at the Board's request).  We wanted
to capture ideas for improving Grex on an on-going basis.  Of course,
people tend to use the item for announcements and off-topic questions,
but that's par for the course around here.  The idea of putting this
item in agora was to get it wider exposure, since most users don't read
the coop cf.

As to linking to coop, that can be done (and has: see coop item 284) if
we want to collect ideas in a place where they won't disappear with the
changing seasons (actually they don't disappear but they become harder
to find).

If you'd like to see what the previous Town Hall item was about, see
coop item 278 or the previous agora (summer item 6).  There are a lot of
discussions and ideas there.  If you'd like to continue them, feel free.
Old coop items are also good for ideas if you'd like to resurrect them
here.  You'll find that many of the current ideas have been discussed
for years and years already (with the same results).

What Grex needs to do is move beyond the discussion phase, choose some
reasonable ideas, and start implementing them.  As I've said before,
many ideas which have been proposed to date are ones we can try and then
remove or modify, if they don't work as expected.  So, keep an open
mind.

Email would be more usable if grex would dump any mails with Subject:
=?koi8-r.  At least 90% of spams recently are from Russia, and it would save
a lot of disk space not to be storing them in multiple mail accounts.  I do
get Russian mails from real people, with real subject lines, never this one.

the web page needs to be more interactive.  web email. web chat .etc 
Need to face the fact that only minimal users now access grex in any
other way.

Does that make me a "minimal user"?

I must also be minimal.  I hate web access.

  
guress i;m monimal as welll.   
  
that said, web access does need ot improve considerably, imo.
  
cli access is plenty good, but it;s rally fallen out of favor for the
majority of surfers. 
  

re #8,9, sorry but yes you guys are minimal, you guys are unix
dinosaurs.  grex can only ever be signficant again if it moves into the
modern era.

Dinosaurs take up a lot more space than a text file.

You know, if I were to sum up modern web design; minimalist, simplified,
and streamlined would be words I would use. 

Richard doesn't know what he is talking about.

I see a lot of really bloated websites.

A lot of websites need modernization.

re #13 neither does nharmon if he doesn't realize that grex will never
get new users, younger users, without a new approach, more interactive,
to its web page.

Modernization is not always an improvement.  A seed saving organization that
I belong to has its catalog on the internet now.  It shows only the first few
sentences of four entries from each page (which has dozens of entries) and
is 200K in size because of all the fancy programming and their insistence on
including a long list of all the varieties offered, on each page (instead of
a link back to a list).  Contains about .5K of useful info, then you need to
go to another page to see the rest of the entry.  A lot of the users live in
farm country and could not get broadband if they wanted it.  Dialup was taking
40 sec to load each page (with 2 pages per entry).  The fancy fonts,
backgrounds, etc. for each variety wasted a lot of this space.  Plain text
(or plain HTML) could have produced a page listing everything about 30
vegetables in 2K or so that everyone could have read.  Form over function.

re: 16
How do you suppose a whiz-bang web page is going to entice new or younger
users, when there's already an oversaturation of places to talk about whatever
you want, through the magic of PHPBB? 

I don't mean that to take a shot, but setting up a web BBS is literally as
easy as clicking "Install" and slapping a logo on top of a premade skin.

I'm saying that in the situation Grex is in, there is no reason NOT to 
overhaul the web page.  There is no status quo here to fall back on.  
Grex is either going to change to survive or it isn't.  The stats 
clearly show that very few people dial in or telnet in anymore.  Any 
improvements have to be geared toward those using the website.

Well richard, I am sure that if you would like to overhaul the webpage
and then submit your designs to the board, they will be fairly
considered. 

re #20 I didn't say that I had the expertise to do this myself.  It is 
useless to "ask for suggestions" in my opinion, when the board won't 
even consider the suggestions and then says, 'do it yourself'  This 
attitude gets grex nowhere.  Why even enter this item if nobody wants 
to change anything?

We want to move forward.  We don't have any volunteer movers at present.

FWIW, I am not on the board and have nothing to do with this item. I
just find the way you make your suggestions to be kind of obnoxious.
That is my own opinion and doesn't represent the opinions of anyone
else. 

Yes it does, slynne, it represents my opinions too.

The board is considering the suggestions you and others have made.  What
makes you think we won't?  I think updating the web pages and adding
more web apps would be a good idea.  It's not so much that there are
plenty of other places with fancy web pages to visit, but that there are
few any more who like to use the command line and probably take a look
and run away fast.  We'll never know what will work if we don't try and
I have to admit, it's more than a little frustrating to see every idea
torpedoed before it gets tried.  At this rate, we won't do anything.  We
can always ask for help in getting things done, but without a clear idea
of what we want to do, it will be frustrating for any volunteers.

re: 19
Since you've admitted that you don't have the background for doing it, I think
it's worth pointing out that overhauling Grex's web presence is not an
insubstantial amount of work. 

There has to be some compelling reason to be here, though. And from what I've
seen, that reason is largely nostalgia. With the exception of zulu, there
haven't been any names in BBS that strike me as being new. 

Years and years ago, you could have played the "Ann Arbor Flavor" card, but
that's largely gone now, and available elsewhere. 

Having a flashy web site isn't enough these days to answer:
*Who do you want to attract?
*How will you attract them?
*Why do you want to attract them?
*What unique or compelling reason will they have to stay?

And how many pieces of flair are you wearing

So, since a flashy web site isn't enough, what is?  Any suggestions?

I would rather have a simple system than a fancy one that takes time to load.

all I did was make suggestions without any mean spiritedness.  I fail to 
see why slynne thinks that is any more obnoxious than anyone else making 
suggestions.

It's because she knows you're going to shop it on M-Net to great success,
before the slow pokes here get around to discussing it in coop.

resp:30 If you really want to know...

You said: "I'm saying that in the situation Grex is in, there is no
reason NOT to overhaul the web page."

But there is a reason NOT to overhaul the web page. There might not be
anyone with the skills and the time to do it. There is a difference
between what you said and simply making a suggestion which would go a
little more like this: "It would be a very good thing to overhaul the
web page" 

Didn't we already recently overhaul the web page?

resp:33 The main Grex page is five or six years old. All of the interior
backtalk pages are at least seven years old (I think)

Which in Internet years is....a lot.  There is also a need to update
much of the information on our web site.

Grex also needs to stop this staff verification of new users.  It is 
against the principles on which grex was founded, and I believe that 
if such stats existed, you would see that new usership has dropped 
significantly since Cross put his little patch on the new user 
program.  New users don't stay around waiting for staff members to 
wave their magic wands and decide they are good enough, real enough, 
to post here.  They just go away.  

But everytime I suggest this, it hits a wall.  Staff just doesn't want 
to go there, even if there is broad user support for it.

I thought broad user support was where verification came from?

IIRC the issue with verification is this: If we don't verify, we tend to
have problem users taking the system down. If we had more staff
resources, we could probably handle this. But we don't. Still, I recall
that it was a short term solution and in the long run, if we don't make
it really easy for new people to sign up, there is no future. On the
other hand, if the system keeps being brought down by malicious people,
there is no future. 

resp:30 Well, since you asked....  Because you, Richard, stamp your 
foot every time someone questions one of your suggestions; nevermind 
the fact that they come across more as demand than otherwise.

resp:36 It's certainly not perfect.  But every time you bring this up, 
I remind you that Chad and Mickeyd were taking down Grex every chance 
they got, and we had no way to block them without putting in some kind 
of verification system.

Oh, and by the way?  You come across as a real asshole in that 
response.  Just food for thought, man.

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