Is it time for a restart of this conference, and the creation of an alias
called, "windows" for it?  Recently, someone couldn't find a windows
conference, and this one is getting old....  Also, the FW's don't seem
particularily active in grex anymore.

20 responses total.

If you must have an MS Windows alias, at least capitalise
the W to avoid confusion with other windowing systems.

Never mind pluralising it.

I wasn't /just/ thinking of X ;-)

Sure, that could be done....

  
   1. I am still lurking about.

   2. I am Not going to resign.

   3. There will be no restart.


   I have spoken.

This response has been erased.

It only took you three months to respond.  Thanks!

Macht nicht. A restart is probably due, but is there left anyone to 
participate in it?   -DTK 

Please don't restart this.  It's a fascinating historical
repository of computer stuff.

I agree, no need to restart. In fact, no real need for multiple
technical conferences. :P

resp:9 Well, restarting doesn't make the old content go away.

I did think about that because of the way that Jellyware was
preserved.  I'm not sure what purpose it would serve though.

At one point, I thought it would foster new discussion.  But I think that
conferencing on Grex is all but dead anyway, and really don't feel motivated
to invest much effort into improving it.

Communicating, however, is not dead (yet), it's just moved on to other
applications (some of which are so terse as to be almost worthless
for serious discussion).  Anyway, would discussions be more lively in
a different forum?  Or are discussions no longer possible no matter
what the application displaying them?

I think that they would likely be more lively in another forum, but to my mind
the real issue with Grex is the community less than the software.  By and
large, it is small, close-minded and adverse to change.  It's also hard to
"break into", so to speak: too many people who were big fishes in a very small
pond for too long.

Well, actually, I kind of take that back: those days are mostly over.

Sometimes new applications can attract new users.  That might be worth a try.
Though I agree about the current community.  This medium has largely run its
course.  In terms of motivating people to help, what do you think would make
Grex worth the effort of people who do not already contribute?

I think we need to rethink our definition of what it means to contribute. 
I suspect that new users contribute more than we realize, since most of the
users who are running the system rarely look outside of the BBS side of the
house.

I think we can drive up usage by making it attractive for people to come here
and do things.  What those things are is kind of beyond me at this point,
though.

Keeping Grex going is one goal.  Not just because corporations (and
systems) have a life of their own and an internal motivation to
continue, but because we have something good to offer to the wider
world.  We offer a platform for communication and education that is free
to all.  That is still a relatively rare thing even in a world with
twitter and facebook.

Keeping a discussion reasonable is a good contribution, but we need to
discuss things other than the same topics that the same six people argue
about.  We need to do so in a different manner than how we do now (this
is not so much about the application used but about respect, although
applications can help enforce some of that).

One thing everyone can do is brainstorm ideas for Grex: how to improve
Grex, what Grex can offer, where can we get the people resources, etc.
We generally lack for the time and experience to implement ideas.

When you have an idea to clean up, where do you start?  Anywhere!  If
you let the problems overwhelm you, they just get bigger and more
intractable.

We generally lack for time to even do the basic operations of our
business (we are doing them but it's like pulling teeth to do simple
things).  One big step would be to get back on track with those.  Broken
windows, even virtual & metaphorical ones, tend to sap motivation.

My theory of non-profit organizations is that people are happy to help
as long as doing so doesn't turn into a huge aggravation.  If that
happens they find something else to do with their time that is less
aggravating and more about making them feel good ("what I like to
do").  What makes people feel good is a moving target.  And hard work is
generally not an aggravation if there is a good result to make you feel
good.  How do you make people feel good?  Saying thank you and
showing appreciation helps a lot.  We've been remiss on this score
many times, but we do see some that from time to time, which is good.

We'd probably make more headway on something if we just do it and let
people join in or not as they choose.  If they want to insult each other
in bbs then let them, but we should give alternatives for the people who
don't want to be in that environment.

Well, let's be realistic and honest: there is nothing that Grex offers that
is not offered elsewhere, and frankly, better.  Our platform for communication
and education is pretty long in the tooth and hasn't changed fundamentally
since the mid 1990s (and prior to that, it was based on a program from the
early 1980s).  There are better offerings elsewhere, and I don't just mean
twitter, facebook and Google+.

The thing is, I tried for several years to solicit ideas for how to improve
Grex.  I wanted a 'vision' for what it could become.  But I got, essentially,
no response from the BBS community.

So ... forget the BBS community.  Look elsewhere.  We get lots of accounts
created per day; we get people asking for validation and you, Kent, have been
doing an excellent job staying on top of that.  Instead of trying to bring
those people into the conferencing fold, why not see what they want to use
Grex for (clearly NOT the BBS) and start optimizing for that?

Okay, well, I see a lot of IRC users lately.  I know some other free
Unix systems offer bots and bouncers, but we don't for security reasons.
Maybe there is a way around that.  

I'm thinking once we are on the more powerful computer, we might be
able to loosen up the limits on processes a bit and maybe allow more
than one login at a time (as long as it doesn't overwhelm our internet
connection).

Some people want to learn to program in Unix, in one or more languages,
and since you installed a lot them, there is a lot of choice in what you
can learn in terms of programming.  When they ask for validation these
folks say they want to learn Unix or programming (that's why I put the
bit about shells in my boilerplate I send to validated users. It's
still a bit discouraging to see people who want to learn Unix picking
the menu shell or even the bbsh, of all things).

There is from time to time user interest in using Grex as a proxy to
reach other sites.  And to use Grex as a place to communicate in ways
they can't where they live.  The latter is okay, the former not so much
which is why we don't allow it (in spite of sites like LifeHacker
promoting it).

One issue would be reaching these people that don't participate in the
bbs system.  The motd might be one way.  Our web page another.  It's not
impossible.  But it's clear that many people don't read our FAQ so it's
not clear how much of the web site they are reading on a regular basis.
It's worth a try to reach more types of users than just bbs users.

Grex has had a lot of people who try to use our environment to bring
our system down or bother other systems such that we need to be careful
about what we allow.  Verification may be the way out of that on the
assumption that people who want to do bad things probably don't want
to be identified to the authorities.  We don't really advertise much
that if you get verified you can run a bot or bouncer, although it is
mentioned in our FAQ.

We've had some pretty decent days lately in terms of validation
activites and it's hard to tell where that is coming from.  If we knew,
maybe we could encourage it more.  I know one group were from a company
or so they said.  I don't know what they want to use Grex for.  Perhaps
application development or as a second e-mail address.  Any day we do
5 or 6 validations is good and a lot better than those days we only
do 1 or none (actually few days have no requests, but it is more
likely it'll just be one or two).

Having the EMU class use our system was a good thing.  I don't know if
we can encourage more of that or make that experience better for those
folks.

We need to move more people from resh to validated. I don't have a good
handle on why people don't take the path to validation, but it is a
sequence of hoops to jump through and the resh environment is, I'm sure,
a big turnoff to a lot of people.  Some people figure out it's just
an e-mail request right away and ask for validation within minutes of
getting the resh account.

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