Grex Cyberpunk Conference

View Responses

Grex Cyberpunk Item 65: will the java enhanced web kill Grex?
Entered by agent86 on Wed Jan 7 11:17:10 UTC 1998:

Will the web kill conferencing systems like Grex?
Does this seem like a stupid question to you? Let me tell you, it isn't. Web
pages now are beginning to incororate BBS features through java, and chat.
Since everyone at these sites has similiar interests, it makes for interesting
conversation... these systems are easy top find, too. Even if you aren't
looking for chat/bbs features, you stumble across them automatically... when
you are looking for a particular topic, many of the largest websites are
incorporating these features. For example, do a net search for skiing or
snowboarding. The first site listed on the search results will likely have
some sort of BBS and chat system incorporated in it... to see this stuff at
work, check out http://www.solsnowboarding.com ... 

So, the question: will Grex and other systems like it be killed by the web?
Why or why not?

10 responses total.

#1 of 10 by scott on Wed Jan 7 17:22:45 1998:

Heh.  We already *do* conferencing on the web.

In a larger sense, probably not.  For one thing, Grex is pretty impartial,
unlike a website for some major corporation.  Censoring comes to mind here.
Another thing about Grex is "community".  Not just skiers talking only about
skiing, but friends talking about many subjects.  A nice advantage in that
is that you only have to identify twits once, then you can go into a different
topic and know that a particular user is never correct.

Despite all the Web-based free email systems, we still move a lot of mail.

#2 of 10 by larsn on Wed Jan 7 20:35:56 1998:

*shrug*, as far as I'm concerned, if I want to chat I use ICQ or mIRC (or
something else) and when I want to browse the web I use IE or Netscape or
lynx. Only in very confused states do I try to browse the web in mIRC and chat
in IE.

#3 of 10 by srw on Sun Jan 25 06:55:13 1998:

Teh question points out that Grex was one of only a few places you could come
to to do conferencing as recently as a few years ago. Now, you can do it in
a zillion webs ites all over the place.

So Grex has lots of new competition. Will this kill us?

There are two things that discriminate Grex from any other conferencing
system. (1) The quality of the software it runs, and (2) the quality of the
community of people who post here. the queality of their posts, actually.

(2) os probably more important than (1),and more discriminating too. If Jan
and I are successful at spreading the use of backtalk, there will be a lot
more places that not only offer conferncing, but conferencing with full
feature support. Actually there are other packages that are very good too,
but there is a lot of crappy stuff out there that doesn't enourage users to
come back in and toilter out what they don't want to see.

But we are notworried about this, because it is the people who make up the
system that really define it. If there are 1000 places for me to go
conference, willl I go to all of them. Heck no. I 'll go where I find good
company, and good conversations.  Grex is one of those places.

So I think Grex is nothoing to behurt by an explosion in this genre.

#4 of 10 by ed on Thu Jul 5 10:16:16 2001:

i'm v new to grex, but in the short time i've been here, i've noticed two
things that are different from the html/java based 'bbs's.
1) like srw said... the quality of users & posts - a lot of the others
degenerate into mindless slanging on a regular basis
2) the conferences are well maintained, rather than just being set up and left
to decay

#5 of 10 by jhudson on Fri Jul 6 15:12:42 2001:

I would rather not see Java. CGI is better for this kind of system.
Besides, it's more portable.  I could run this from my console
Linux as it stands.

#6 of 10 by freddude on Wed Dec 18 23:59:20 2002:

I don't think Grex is ever going to die.

#7 of 10 by zyraf on Fri Jul 9 13:43:28 2004:

Grex will be alive if someone uses it. so dont forget about this cool thing!
BBS's are FOREVER! GREX is FOREVER!
(:

#8 of 10 by foxworth on Tue Jul 13 18:49:44 2004:

This is not as big an issue as some people may think it is.  Java-based
BBS's are not a threat to something like Grex, because the people who go for
the Java-based stuff are not usually the kind of people who would go for
something like Grex.  We are much more civilized than than our Java
counterparts.  THink of it this way: are you, a Grex user going to switch to
Java?  Then why are you worrying?

#9 of 10 by greebo on Wed Oct 13 11:55:44 2004:

I just joined grex today and i don't think that java is going to kill this
kind of system. It's just some kind of natural selection - the part of the
internet users which don't reach beyond IE and Outlook won't arrive in these
"holy halls" (or how is it expressed in english) while they flood these
instant-boards spreading across the world wide web. I'm glad to see that not
everyone equals the world wide web to the internet (webinterfaces for mail,
webinterfaces for instant messaging, webinterfaces for messaging boards, http
file transfer...)

We shall overcome.

#10 of 10 by foxworth on Mon Oct 25 18:01:52 2004:

Spoken like a true believer, my friend.  Java could never rival what we have
here.  This place embodies the true Hacker spirit.  Sure, Captain Crunch, Woz,
Lee Felsenstien, and all the rest might be (semi)gone, but the spirit will
always live on.  The kind of people who come here are the kind of people who
stay here.  Do not worry, fellow travellers, for no one can take this from
us.

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.