Should conferences on Grex be open to search engines?  Doing so would open 
us up in a new way and possibly bring in participants.  I'd suggest this 
start with only new conferences or freshly restarted conferences and, 
except for agora and coop, only with the agreement of the conference 
fairwitness. Any conference that is indexed would state this on the 
conference login screen.

What do you think?

38 responses total.

No.

I wonder if there is a way to set up an experimental conference on Grex.
 

I can imagine one with conduct guidelines (no harassment or personal
attacks and no graffiti). One where the moderator was expected to remove
posts that didn't follow the guidelines and could ban user-ids.  

One that was searchable.  

I'd like to see Grex offer the kind of conferencing experience that
people have come to expect, while still maintaining our Freedom of
Speech ribbon.  But perhaps the time has come to segregate the Shoot-Out
forums from the  Symphony forums.  

At the symphony, people who firmly believe in free speech can still come
together for an experience that has lots of rules and expectations. The
orchestra itself is extremely rules driven, and the audience has a
fairly high level of agreed-upon behavior.  

Outside, guns can blaze until the US Marshals arrive.  But inside a
group of us who want to behave in a certain manner can enjoy our
afternoon of harmony, no matter what the guys are doing down at the
corral.  

This response has been erased.

(I scribbled #3 due to an editing snafu.  Here it is again, corrected:)

Re #1: Why?  Grex needs to be more visible on the web, less of a walled
garden.  Are we trying to hide?  I wouldn't support making items
*retroactively* indexable by search engines, since people posted there
with the understanding that it wouldn't be.  But for new and restarted
Agoras, Coops, and other conferences at their discretion - sure, why not?  

I think it would benefit Grex to be more visible on the web, to be
easier for folks to find, to join the global conversation.  Consider a
technical conference like "web" or "programming", or even "kitchen" - if
a Grex item showed up for somebody doing a Google search on a topic like
"ruby on rails" or "unix shell" or "bento boxes", they might check it
out, join Grex, become part of the community.  We need ways to attract
more users, and it seems to me that search engine indexing of Grex
content would be a very powerful mechanism for doing so. To the extent
that Grex has an educational mission, indexing the conferences would be
right in line with it.

I wouldn't favor the suggestion in #2 of tying indexability to
moderation, though.

By the way, it would be technically easy to implement this proposal,
with a minor tweak or two to Backtalk being the only programming involved.

 re #0:  No.

 re #4:  
 > Why?  Grex needs to be more visible on the web,
 > less of a walled garden.  Are we trying to hide?

 Hide?  No.

 Balance public participation vs. personal privacy?  Absolutely yes.

 We've had several vivid examples of people on Grex realizing, 
 to their regret, that they had shared too much personal information
 about themselves.  

 I already self-censor my comments to a substantial extent because of
 privacy concerns.  If I expected my conversations to be Googleable
 forever it's doubtful I'd ever participate openly in a political or
 religious discussion here or share details about my personal life
 again.

As is often the case, mike said it better than I probably would have.

Most of the long-timers here evolved in a world where it seemed like 
a good idea to put their real identities online.  With ~20 years 
experience, most of the world is deciding that this is NOT a good 
idea for informal social chat forums, or for a significant number 
of political forums.
 
If I understand correctly, LiveJournal has a solid policy against 
using individual names.
 
One would have to view everything written on Grex through the lens 
of every prospective future employer.   

If you want to put Grex 2 on Google, then it should be with a full 
reboot, down to the user name level.

I agree with Ken. I don't like the idea of making grex crawlable by the
search engines. But if this is what Grex does, please somebody hand me a
script so I can scribble everything I've ever posted and I'll create a
new username.

Yeah. I say things here that I wouldnt say on my blog or someplace else
that is indexed by google. Now, I can see the benefits of making
conferences searchable but if that were the case, I really do think it
should be with a fresh start as Ken suggests. Then I would need a
totally different user name and screen name etc. 

It isnt even that I have shared anything inappropriate but I like to use
grex to vent sometimes and while I know it is a risk, I would like to
continue to do that but I dont need folks googling my rants about them
;)

Well, I think people here are under the impression there is more privacy 
on Grex than really exists.  Really.  A quick Google search on both 
Nathan Harmon and Mike McNally brings up links to Grex.  Like, on the 
first page of hits. Anyone wanting to read your posting has only to log 
in to Grex, anonymously, and wade through some conferences.  

Most of us here are seasoned internet users.  We know that what you 
write anywhere on the internet is out of your control. Really.  If it's 
been read by anyone - it's no longer yours.  

I'm always so surprised to see how people don't get this.  So we can 
pretend it's not true and watch our community shrink or we can be aware, 
cautious, AND make Grex more visible.
  

Looks like it's time to break out the Valerie script then.

Hey, let's not overreact.  The proposal is to permit conferences to
*opt* to allow web crawlers, not impose it on all conferences, and
certainly not allow it retroactively for existing posts.  Any indexable
conferences would be clearly identified as such.

I don't know about LiveJournal's policies, but there are a several
mailing lists that I subscribe to in which people use their real names
and whose archives are indexed by search engines.    Frankly, if the
"web" and "jellyware" conferences were accessible by search engines, and
therefore capable of reaching a wider audience than a small number of
Grex users, it would make me *more* inclined to post in those
conferences, not less.  Under my real name, of course.  And the greater
visibility might serve to attract more users to Grex who would be
valuable participants in our community.

I can understand that folks might not want certain types of discussions
indexed.  One could debate whether Coop or Agora should be indexed.  But
the proposal is not to expose everything on Grex to web crawlers. 
Icertainly think that the potential benefits are substantial enough that
someone should be able to run a new conference in Google-searchable mode
if they want to.  People uncomfortable with that wouldn't have to
participate in such conferences.  Like I said recently in another item,
I think Grex should be open to running different conferences under
different rules.  We might learn something.

 re #10:  Can you post the exact query string you are using?
 I can't find any Grex links in the first several pages of Google
 results when I Google "Mike McNally" or "Michael McNally".
 In fact the only results I get that are for me (as opposed to
 some other Mike McNally -- it's not a very uncommon name)
 are to the friends' site where my photos are hosted.

It was either "Mike McNally Ketchikan" or "Mike McNally computer".

Cool about your running for council, Mike.  You would have done a nice 
job.  

 Hmmm..  Strange.  I tried both "Mike McNally Ketchikan" and 
 "Mike McNally computer" and didn't find a hint of Grex in the
 first 3 pages of search results (I stopped checking after that.)

It's about 2/3 of the way down the first page I'm given searching for 
"Mike McNally computer"on Google.  It's a link to Grex Staff Notes: 
Introduction on cyberspace.org .

Again, thinking like that potential employer, I did a Goggle search on
"Lynne Fremont job dissatisfaction".  About half way down the first
page - a hit for The Lynne Show (part 2).  The news is not good. ;-)

Grex is being slowly strangled.  I'm just trying to figure out if it's
for a good reason.

 Interesting.  I didn't find that on the first page of search results
 until I changed the preferences to show 20 results per page.  What's
 strange is that I had previously looked through the first three pages
 of results (which should have been the top 30 hits) and not found any
 mention of Grex.

The funny thing is that I am pretty sure that my current employer *did*
google me before hiring me. ;) 

I bet Google googles its new employees!

i read that the neo nazis are angry google observed the 50th anniversary of
sputnik but won't cowtow to operation iraqi freedom(islam)

The issue of opening up the conferences to search engines was discussed
here two years ago.  See item 269 in the "oldcoop" conference
(item:coop13,269).  It's interesting to read that and see the change in
attitudes between then and now.  There were reservations then too, but
on the whole, the idea was greeted more favorably, with generally more
perception of the plusses and less concern about the minuses.

The number of participants in the previous discussion indicates to me
that there are a lot fewer people reading Coop now than then.  This is
not good.

The old item was posted by Jan Wolter, who stated that opening up
everything to Google and other search engines would be trivial (this it
true; no programming required) and that opening *selected* conferences
would be difficult but probably possible.  I'm not sure it would even be
all that difficult; haven't thought it all the way through, but one
might be able to implement this with some changes to our Apache
configuration, without having to modify Backtalk at all.

The plusses still seem to me to outweigh the minuses.

re 0 ... ummm, no. gavie it a second's thought too

I'm dropping this one.

Last one out turn off the lights, please. 

I still think this is an issue worth considering. It is something
significant enough that I think it should be a change made by a member
vote though. 

It would most certainly have to go to the membership for a vote.  But I 
don't think there is anywhere near the necessary support. C'est la vie.

Why not proceed to Grex II, intentionally designed for the web?

This response has been erased.

I'm not sure I see what that would do for Grex.  If our community
wants to stay insular, then Grex II wouldn't serve a purpose.  And
there are already lots of interesting communities out there with
mostly open forums, so starting a new one from scratch, to mimic an
old one?  (Mary yawns.)
 
 Something new, and fresh, taking what we've learned and applying it
 to WWW?  Cool.  I've heard some ideas that are intriguing - John has
 mentioned a few here.  But it would look nothing like Grex for the most 
 part.  Grex has been done.

Instead of internet, I'm hearing a new term "interwebs".

What would Grex look like on the interwebs? 

(let me put my vote in right now for "able to edit your own
posts,forever").  I'm in several communities that allow that, and boy
does it feel clunky to be back in the "mistakes and all, forever" mode.

http://xkcd.com/181/

Re. 30 is very funny.

Re #30:  I think the reason for not allowing editing of posts is to
prevent people involved in a debate from being able to say "I never
said that" when they really did.  Of course, they can always scribble
a post, but that leaves behind the evidence that it was once there,
even if the contents themselves are lost, so those denials are less
credible.

Back when I first started BBSing, many of the BBS's I used were on
8 bit systems with no hard drive, and things didn't hang around for
a decade or more.  A couple of weeks or a month, in most cases, and
it was gone.  These Unix systems may have been different, but they
weren't the norm.  That fact has to be taken into consideration when
doing anything like making things available to google searches, or
making them editable, at least after they've been read by others.

Usenet posts have never been editable, but then, editing thousands
of copies on servers throughout the world would be a lost cause,
anyway.

Well, USENET has "supercede" which is sort of like edit, but it wasn't 
widely used nor universally supported.  The widespread practice of
quoting in that medium means editing would be of limited value anyway.

The communities that I frequent that do allow editing do not allow users
to delete anything but the content of the post.  They also have a
"version" indicator that shows when the post was first entered, and when
it was last edited, and whether the edit was by the poster or a
moderator.

One of them is Wizards of the Coast, which is frequented by
Magic-players and Dungeon and Dragons players, most of whom are
argumentative teen aged boys.  I've never seen evidence of
"bait-and-switch", "I never said that" bits. It seems like the most
likely community to engage in that activity.  

Does anyone hang out in an editable community where this is a problem?

Are you an argumentative teenaged boy, C. S. ?

re $0 .. no, thak you anyway.

IIRC the thing that "turned the tide" last time was a "trick" that made the
postings of those who wished to not be identified somehow.  Dunno if a similar
trick would work for google indexing.

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