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). 

67 responses total.

I'd like to announce that the Grex auction is still going on, and still
accepting donations.  I think I've hit on a good category of object that
many people have in their homes and may want to donate to the auction:
things-people-gave-you-that-seemed-neat-at-the-time-but-you-never-use.

If you have such things, or anything else to donate, send mail to "auction",
and we'll put it in.  All proceeds from the auction go to benefit Grex, so
all donations to it are tax-deductible.

test pls ignore tks...

pass
?

exit
q
quit
quit
quit
quit
quit

pass
exit
q

Hi emallari, welcome to Grex!

It gets easier ...

I've installed Backtalk version 1.0.0 on Grex.

The differences between this and the previous version 0.9.10 are huge,
but they mainly have to do with being able to install it with just a few
commands, and being more portable to other versions of Unix.  Lots of
Backtalk's guts got rearranged to make this possible.  Users aren't
going to notice any of this unless I introduced some new bugs will doing
it.

Backtalk also has gained some new features that are disabled on Grex so
you won't notice them here.  (Ability to edit your past responses for
example - actually a really bad feature to have, but some of my other
clients wanted it.)

I fixed several minor bugs that nobody ever noticed.

And one actual new feature:  There is now twit filter code.  On the
entrance page, follow the 'edit your personal settings' link and find
a button that says 'edit list of users to ignore'.  I actually
implemented this more than a year ago, and never installed it on Grex.
I'd quite forgotten I had done so until I found the code in there while
fixing some other stuff.

The only change I have noticed between backtalk versions is that the 
default colour is now a pleasant green instead of the light yellow it 
had been.  I find this more readable, for now at least.

Oops.  Actually, I forgot to change that.  I picked this shade of green
long ago when I was still putting the color definitions in each page,
and wanted a hexidecimal color code I could remember.  I started out
with "C0FFEE" but that was too ugly, so I adjusted it to "C0FFE0". 
Steve Weiss named the interface "pistachio" because of the color.  A few
years ago I reset the default color on Grex to yellow because lots of
people hated the green.  Unless everyone has changed their minds, I'll
bring the yellow back.

I prefer the yellow.

Yellow would be my preference as well, but the green does have a certain 
spring-like quality...

        I would like to announce that on GREX we no longer say 'shitdicks',
we say 'pooppy weinner'.

This response has been erased.

Maybe if I give Backtalk a sufficiently ugly default color, more
fairwitnesses will be inspired to set their own color colors.

This response has been erased.

Re resp:12 - Not all fw's use Backtalk.

I was, of course, inspired a long time ago to set my own colors
in Enigma.

I assume my desired feature - user-settable colors - didn't make
it to 1.0.0.

        Jan, may I humbly suggest the AmigaDOS colour scheme, which was
comprised of the two colours that clash the most in most colour harmony
schemes, orange and blue ... ? :)

Orange and Blue isn't that bad, espicially if you use a dark blue.  It 
actually looks kind nifty on some sports jerseys.

The 2 ugliest colours you can have on a jersey (and probably your 
monitor too) are Orange and Brown.

Fall colors? Sounds good to me.

You have never seen the Away jerseys for the WMU hockey team, have you?

Nope. But must not be Fall colors.

WMU's colors are ghastly...gold and brown...yuck.

Ah, but the Cleveland Browns look pretty good.  Orange and blue, being 
on opposite sides of the wheel, match well together.  However, it makes 
for a lousy screen scheme.  

I like the pistachio pistachio colors :)  However, I've been using 
picospan more lately.

I hate orange and blue together.  Yuck.  

I hate purple and bright yellow together. Ick!

Orange and Blue together I can stand.  Syracuse's jerseys aren't that 
incredibly ugly.

WMU's colours and BG's colours are terrible.  Whoever designed their 
uniforms should be shot.

Western Michigan ?  Yeah, the colors of shit and piss didn't do much for me
while I was there..

Florida's uniforms are great, and used to be even better.  I don't know about
their hockey uniforms, but Bowling Green's football uniforms (logically, they
are orange) aren't that bad.

How does a fairwitness set colors in a conf?

If you visit the conference with Backtalk, you'll find a red button
on the conference home page that leads to a control panel for setting
conference options.  Color setting is on there.

I installed a new version of Backtalk on Grex.  This is a release full
of little features and bug fixes.

New stuff in 1.0.1:

  Welcome Page:
  - Looks a bit better to lynx users.

  Entrance Page:
  - Restored yellow background.
  - There is a "Summarize Active Items" button on the home page that
    brings up a summary of how many new items there are in each of
    your hot list conferences.  If you want this to come up everytime
    you enter backtalk, there is an option you can set to do so (note
    that if your hotlist is long, this is likely to make the entrance
    page come up rather slow).

  Edit Hot List Page:
  - List of conferences was broken, is now fixed.

  Conference Home Page:
  - If you know the item number(s) you want to read, you can type them
    into a box on the conference home page.
  - There is a button to list participants in the conference.  Like the
    Picospan participants command, this is hopelessly slow.  So much so
    that the button probably should go away on Grex.
  - Conference names are now capitalized by default.
  - Fixed a bug with "resign" that nobody ever noticed was there.

  Item List Page:
  - Formatting cleaned up.
  - You can now do a "read unseen" to see new and unseen items.
  - There is now a "mark seen" button.  You can also mark all responses
    entered before a certain date as 'seen' (handy if you lost a
    participation file and know when you were in the conference last).
  - Fixed a Y2K bug in "read since yesterday" code.

  Read Page:
  - The conference name at the top of the page is clickable to return
    to the confhome page.

  Invisible Stuff:
  - Interfaces (like pistachio and vanilla) can now be distributed
    separately from the core Backtalk system more easily.
  - Better compatibility with Yapp.
  - Improved portability to an ever-widening variety of strange Unixes.

Ohhh... Okay. :)

Nice changes, Jan.  Thanks.

(Feature request:  In the item list page, I'd like an option to
list just the items with new responses, like what "browse new"
does for you in Picospan.)

  Thanks, Jan.

I keep getting freaked out when I join a conference in Backtalk, and see 
the following:

Agora has 125 items: 0 brand new, 11 with new responses.

I keep reading the "125" as "new responses" or "new items".

John- it must be a Perry thing, I keep doing that too.

It seems pretty unambiguous to me.  Is there are a way to format that
message that would seem less alarming to you?

I know that I thought long & hard about the
        55 newresponse items and 52 brandnew items
        First item 1, last 176
message before I put it into PicoSpan.  Confer did something different;
I think it may have listed out each item with new responses, perhaps
something like:
        New response items:
           1   2   3  20  35  72 123
        New items: 241-245
I didn't like that display, because if you haven't been in a conference
in a while, you get a very scary list of items with new responses, and I
never found having a simple list of item #'s all that useful.  I think I
was at least somewhat tempted to leave the "First item X,last Y" part
off entirely, but I did want to say something if there weren't any new
items, and I also wanted the output from "display conference" to be
similar and show the same information.  Using the words "first" and
"last" was deliberate - I wanted to use the same words that could be
used in item ranges, "read first" or "read last".

Hi

I think it's just a matter of getting used to it.  Maybe something like:

Agora has 0 brand new items, 11 with new responses, 125 total responses.

I also think #36 sounds like an interesting option to make available.  
How about letting people configure what they want to see, Jan?  Would 
that be difficult?

IWLTA that the part of the conference login message which reads
"This conference has been restarted, join <confname> for the old
version" will become obsolete after a while.  Such messages should
probably include a hint at the actual conference version number
(e.g. agora17) for ease of reference in the not-so-far future.

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