This item is for system announcements (new computer equipment on Grex, 
system upgrades, Grex meetings, etc.).  Personal announcements should go 
back in item 2; Grex system *problems* belong in the next item (#4). 

48 responses total.

The Bylaw amendment to permit telephone (or similar) attendance at BOD
meetings PASSED by a vote of 28 to 9.

This response has been erased.

Given that 37 members voted, 28 to 9 was the slimmest margin possible.
It takes a 3/4 majority to pass a bylaw amendment.

This response has been erased.

This response has been erased.

This response has been erased.

jp2 is a bum!

The next version of Backtalk is available on Grex.  It's a mildly
radical revision, so I haven't installed it as the default.  If you
connect to backtalk the usual way, you get the old version.  If you want
to try the new version go to

http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/backtalk-1.2.3

Differences:

  - In pistachio, each item page now shows a "Favor" button next to the
    "Forget" button.  There are also "Favor" and "Disfavor" buttons on
    the item list page in pistachio, and command to favor and disfavor
    items in the pulldown lists in the abalone interface.

    If you mark an item as a favorite, two things happen.  First, when
    the items in a conference are listed, your "favorite items" are
    listed first.  Second, when you read the conference, your "favorite
    items" will be displayed first.

  - There are settings you set in either pistachio or abalone that can
    make items automatically become favorites.  The default settings
    are that when you post an item, that item automatically becomes a
    favorite, and remains so until you click the "disfavor" button, and
    when you respond to an item, that item automatically becomes a
    temporary favorite.  Temporary favorites are only favorites until
    the next time you read them - so it becomes a favorite until you
    have seen the first set of responses to your response, and then,
    unless you explicitly favor it, it reverts to normal.

  - You can now set "private item titles" in pistachio or abalone.  This
    is kind of like retitling an item, except that you are the only one
    who sees the new title.  You can use this the change titles that
    annoy you, or to append short notes to items.

  - In pistachio, you can now set your own background and text colors,
    as well as choosing your own button styles.  This is on a per-
    conference basis, so you can set different colors in different
    conferences.  There is a new "Edit your conference settings" button
    on the conference home page that lets you do this.

  - In pistachio, you can set default item orderings on a per-conference
    basis, using the same "edit your conference settings" button.  The
    default is "read favorite items before others" but you can also
    say you want brandnew items before or after newresponse items, and
    you can say you want items in reverse numerical order.  You can
    combine these.

  - To store all this per-user/per-conference and per-user/per-item
    data I devised a new participation file format for Backtalk.
    However, to maintain compatibility with Picospan, I taught it to
    split the data up here.  So you'll still have a perfectly normal
    .agora34.cf file that Picospan understands, but there will also be
    a .agora34.cfx file that contains all the data that Picospan
    doesn't understand.

  - Conference fairwitnesses can now set background images in there
    conferences.  Since this is almost always horrible, I held off on
    putting this option in until users could override them.

  - Links to other items/conferences can now be written in a slightly
    more flexible format.  You can do resp:agora:3:8 or resp:agora.3.8

  - The "Next Item" logic has been fixed so that if you double-click the
    button by accident, you don't get a screen showing no new responses
    for the next item.

  - Better processing of meta-characters in responses.

  - Many little bug fixes.

  - The anchor tags Eric wanted on the pistachio entrance page are
    there.

I'll probably install this as the default backtalk sometime soon.  I'd
appreciate if some users try it out and report any bugs.  

  "mildly radical"?

How about "violently innocuous?"

Wow.  Makes me wish I used Backtalk more often.

I reported a bug in Backtalk 1.2.3 using Pistachio in one of the items 
(Russ's item regarding global warming).  I couldn't see response #1 in 
item #50 when I viewed 0-$ in that item.  I can see response #1 if I 
use the default Backtalk and Pistachio.

Also: when I used "forget" on an item, I was shown the item as usual, 
but I thought it interesting I still saw the "favorite" tag.  I wonder 
what would happen if I selected it.  It either shouldn't show that 
option, or if I chose it, it should "unforget" the item.

This "favorites" stuff seems well thought out.  I liked it when I went 
through Agora, then came back to it and the items I responded to were 
first.  Now to go commit mayhem on the sports conference (which I fw) 
to see what happens.  I'm going to make 1.2.3 my default for Grex from 
my home computer.

Regarding 1.2.3: The "conference background image" automatically tiles, 
which may not be what the fw wants.  Also, I think you should provide 
different conference background images for the opening page for the 
conference and for reading items.

BTW: is this a reasonable place to post comments about 1.2.3?

Does HTML allow non-tiled background images?  I'm not aware of any, but
maybe there is something in the the newer CSS stuff.  I'm not really up
on that yet.

I'll look into the "missing response 1" bug.  Makes me glad I haven't
installed it as the default version yet.

Nothing particularly bad happens if you have a forgotten favorite. 
Basically, the "forget" wins, unless you are reading forgotten items, in
which case this one will show up first.  However, it might be intuitive
if forgetting a favorite item disfavored it, and favoring a forgotten
item remembers it.  Should I do what I think the user probably meant, or
what he told me to do?

Posting bug reports anyplace I see them is fine with me.  I suppose the
system problems item or the backtalk conference or the garage conference
might be plausible places too.

I dunno; everyone *says* they want mind-reading software, but we are all *used
to* (inured to?) software that does what we tell it to, not (necessarily) what
we want to it.  In that universe, mind-reading software is (dare I say it?
of course I do ;) counter-intuitive.

I don't think HTML allows non-tiling images.  The standard way for pages to
get one that isn't tiled is to make it really big, bigger than anyone's
screen resolution is likely to be.

I think gull is right.

The response 1 bug should be fixed now.

Wow janc. I havent tried it yet but it really sounds awesome! Thanks

My general solution to background tiling is to use images very small
or very noncontrasting.  Another solution to tiling is to control
where the images go using tables.  You do have to be careful because
MSIE and Netscape may render the images differently.  It is best
to select a td area for your image space and specify dimentions.

All this is assuming that the foreground information does not 
span multiple td blocks.  In this case, a static graphic containing
both image and graphically rendered text can be assembled jigsaw
puzzle style.

Oh, I was going to add that you can see the jigsaw method used
on <http://football.tqstats.com/brag>.  Most table areas on the top
just render a dedicated image, but the area where the league name 
is displayed is regular text on top of a backgrounded td image
in the shape of a blue striped bar.

What is the default background if the fw doesn't use Backtalk?

Black text on pale yellow with green buttons.

New version of Fronttalk installed.  It now has "FAVOR", "DISFAVOR" and
"MYTITLE" commands - basically just supports the new features of the new
Backtalk.

In case you never heard of it, you run it by typing "ft".  It's a Picospan
clone.

id just like to say that this is my first time on a shell, and im hopelessly
lost, but this is neato....

You don't read as "hopelessly lost".....you even managed to post your
response with lots of trial an error. We cannot yet say "It gets easier...".

I am polytarp!

We already knew that.

(SIgh) .. in #25: s/with/without and s/a/and. It must have been the hour...

I'd like to be the first to describe the "Favorites" addition in 
Backtalk 1.2.3 as "brilliant".  I really like it a lot, and I like the 
way it was implemented.  I haven't labeled anything as a favorite yet, 
but I do enjoy reading my last response items before the other items.

Did you get the idea for that implementation from another conferencing 
system, Jan?  I'm just curious.

I haven't played around much with the "Personal Subject" thing yet, but 
I will do so soon.  As previously stated, I don't like the conference 
background option at this point.  But thinking about it, that's 
probably because I haven't used it correctly, rather than because it's 
bad.

Bummer, personal subjects don't come over from one conference to 
another.  Oh, well, I was just curious on that one anyway.

Hey, Jan, would it be possible to list the conference(s) to which an 
item is linked?  Also, how about an option to read an item in all of 
the conferences to which it's linked, or just in one (or some) of those 
conferences?

How about a way to jump from one conference in which you're reading an 
item, to another one?  Someone could choose to cruise over to the 
sports conference from agora when reading this item, for example.  That 
might help to bring some users from agora to the specialty 
conferences.  (Hypertext for Grex.)

This item is currently (and temporarily) linked from Autumn 2002 Agora 
#3 to sports #123, just for a test.  I doubt sports needs a system 
announcements item but it's the only conference to which I can link.

Because of the way item linking is implemented in Picospan, I'd
think that listing all the conferences to which an item is linked
would require searching the entire item database, an expensive
operation.

Coulnd't a line be added in the item file for Backtalk for each 
conference to which the item is linked?  That would seem simpler than 
an item search.  It could be updated when the item is created or linked 
or unlinked, and it could include all of the pseudonynms for the 
conference name, if desired.  If Jan is creating whole separate copies 
of items for purposes of displaying HTML, this doesn't seem like much 
overhead.

(Confer had a 'follow' option.  "New Follow" would show new responses to the
items that had been marked for following.  I used it in very busy conferences
with items that I was especially interested in.)

Re #32:  For a scheme like that to work, Picospan would have to
cooperate.

re #34: Oh.  Right.  I missed that, didn't I?  (-:

Yup.  There are lots of reasons it would be nice to be able to quickly
find all conferences to which an item is linked.  Fairly simple
extensions to the item file format would handle this (at least simple
for Backtalk, which, unlike Picospan, isn't shy about size-altering
edits of item files).  But if a link is made from Picospan, Backtalk
would have to detect the fact that a link was made and search for it's
other end.  The search isn't really all that expensive, and having done
it once you'd save the result in the file.  But there are a lot of
complexities in the code. There isn't even a clean "list of all
conferences" to search.  You'd also have to do the search again if the
item was linked to three places and killed in one.  

This will probably get implemented someday, but not too soon.  It's yet
another situation where having participation files and conference sum
files in an SQL database would be very nice.

You can say "This item is linked to conf:sports" or if it happens to be
sports item 54 (which it probably isn't) "This item is being linked from
item:agora,3 to item:sports,54".

I think some other systems have things like "favorites".  It isn't
modeled on anything in particular though.  Just a feature I've always
wanted.

I'm probably going to install the new Backtalk as the default very soon
now.  It seems to be working right.

dio lazzarone - chupacabra rulez

Backtalk 1.2.3 is now the default Backtalk.

The favorites feature is very cool. Thanks, Jan.

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