What do you perceive as grex's shortcomings (both technical and community-wise)? What about grex appeals to you the most? What improvements do you want to see and why? If you think Grex is perfect, why?52 responses total.
"There is always room for improvement."
Sure, there is always room for improvement. But, I have to say that for the most part, I kind of like grex the way it is.
Suggestions....
Well, we could improve the hardware (so things are faster). I understand this is already in the works. We can try to attract some interesting new people into the conferences and/or party. This is pretty hard. I am not exactly sure how to do this.
That's a good start. We are discussing the latter point in coop at this moment. So if you have ideas, or are interested in what people's ideas are, that's a good place to start. I want to say it's item 47, or thereabouts.
Yes, I have been reading that item. :)
Technically, I'm mainly frustrated with Grex's speed. I like the interfaces and the system itself. There are some things I'd like to see, such as POP mail. If passwords are still being expired periodically, they shouldn't be, but the staff likes crud like that and I'm never going to win any battles on the subject. Life will go on. Socially, Grex is open to anyone but still manages not to be a slime pit somehow. I don't understand how this happens, but it works. There are quite a few local social events, such as the weekly walk, Board meetings, and Grexpeditions, so that if you can make it to Ann Arbor you can meet some of the people you talk to on-line. Grex is a community. No community anywhere is completely open to anyone who happens by. It is possible to join Grex's community, but I don't know how to make it easy, and am not sure it ought to be easier than it is. I'm pretty happy with Grex as it is. That's why I keep coming back.
I like the interfaces too. At least backtalk. I prefer it to the new- fangled discussion boards out there that make it hard to follow items. Pico could have been a little more intuitive, but I'm used to it now. Sometimes, when I see a new user post in bbs, and it looks like they were having trouble with it, I wish it was simpler. I know it took me a while to get used to the interface, and I guess I was bored enough to keep trying. :) Community wise, you know my stand :) But to be fair, I personally have been pretty happy with the acceptance I've had from most members/users. Improvements could be made, true, and they'll take time, but I'd like it not to stagnate, which I think it has/had.
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I don't know if POP *and* IMAP are necessary. If we decide to supply IMAP access, do we really need POP?
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(I use both on my main mail box. IMAP to delete messages I don't want on my disk at all, and POP to get the ones I do want. Actually, I use Pine and MH.)
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I wasn't arguing from a system load standpoint, I just don't believe in having any more ports open than necessary. ;>
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True. I just looked at the email program on my PDA, and it only seems to support POP.
It bums me that my email can't function like everybody else's (can't get attachments, etc)\
Another vote for improving the speed of conferencing via Backtalk. Cafe Utne runs a similar interface (Motet, derived from Picospan via the Well) and is nice and crisp, and yes I know they've got thousands of extra dollars to spend. Grex's Backtalk suffers sadly in comparison.
Backtalk is much, much faster on M-Net, which lives hand to mouth. M- Net's bank account is often reported in the tens of dollars.
I like backtalk's interface, but it could be faster. I vouch for mnet's faster backtalk. katie - do you mean your email on grex?
Yes, it's the only email I have. Attachments arrive as screenfuls of garbage characters, with no way to interrupt it.
I wish backtalk here ran over a secure connection so passwords wouldn't be sent in plaintext.
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Grex's reason d'etre is its conferences. But every time I suggest grex re-organizing its conferences, eliminating dead or dormant ones, and combining redundant ones (of which there are more than a few convering the same material), I get shot down. People seem to want Grex to be a museum, and even if a conf hasn't had a post in several years, keep it around JUST IN CASE. I still think Grex needs to re-organize its conferences as I suggested, and develop a new conferencing menu. There are too many people who come to grex and just use party and don't even realize there are conferences, or they think Agora is the only conference.
I see no reason to remove conferences. My conference list includes many that get fewer than a response a year. And it does not include many others that are probably far more active. I don't (much) care if someone says something in jellyware every other minute. I do care if someone says something in rialto. Ce'st la vie.
BTW, there are also items I follow in a couple of different conferences. For example, I read the System Problems items in both agora and helpers.
I personally like Grex the way it is. Sure it's slow at times, but so is my connection. I love reading the conferences and am now finally participating. I would become a member just to support Grex if I could afford it. But since I can't even afford a Net connection of my own it will have to wait. It would be nice to see a little less bickering. I support the staff whole hartedly. They get too much greif for the ammount of work they do at no pay!
I'm not sure that I want GREX to be a museum, but it's certainly interesting (only for a relative newcomer, perhaps) to be able to see the "evolution" of the system. Deleting old confs also means someone(s) has/have to sit down and decide which confs to delete, and any arbitrary date you can think of is bound to raise objections. ALso, making the case ofor making the space is a bit incongruous when we're waiting for a new system with more space. The economics of the PC market are such that any new upgrade to give us jmore space, if timely made, is likely to be more cost effective per unit of bytes than the last one, whilst people's time generaly gets more wexpensive over time, not cheaper (fi you work it out based on the amount of $ you would get if you were working at GREX "professionally"). Getting rid of cruft sounds like a good idea, but on top of all the above, you open yourself up to the temptation to "modernise" the system even more by ading this, that and the other, which again is expensive in administratio time and could very well turn out to be a boondoggle. The one thing I'd like to see GREX add - X - is not likely to be added anyway, given the impracticality of using it over dialup and telnet aaround Michigan, never mind on some b ox somewhere over the Rainbow, er, Atlantic. What might be more useful is to see what, if any, changes are made to our work environment on NextGREX, and then figuring out, perhaps at a board meeting or series thereof, what other changes that haven't already happened need to be made in order to turn our new system into "out beloved old system", or improve it where it's generally agreed that GREX sucked. Remember - people have been using hte wheel and axle essentially unchanged for thousands of years!
Jeff, when you said "the one item I'd like to see GREX add - X - " Were you being rhetorical, or did you have something in mind? I'm torn between cleaning up the conferences and leaving them the way they are like. Like Richard, I can see new users trying the one of the defunct conferences and finding no activity, giving up on the system. Like the others, I like the historical fator of having them around. Ine onferenc I would like to see maintained is the archives, where all the best items are linked so it's easy to find them later. It's sadly out of date and I'm sure there were a lot more items after that that deserve t obe linked there.
Re #17: Try using Pine instead of Mail; Pine handles attachments in a reasonably-sane manner, though I think its pager leaves a huge amount to be desired.
I meant X as in ther X Window System, which is the graphical part of UNIX. Russ: did you mean to mention that bit about X in the demographics item here, instead?
Aaah. Ok, thanks
I think the best way to deal with the huge number of conferences would be to have a command that shows you which conferences have had recent activity.
why couldn't all the dead conferenes be put in a seperate section, with a separate menu, and then only keep live current conferences in the main menu. A picospan I and picospan II
Probably because we can't agree on what is "dead," richard.
Yes, some way of getting a list of
all conferences
and
conferences with "recent" activity
would be useful.
There isn't really a "dead" conference, only dormant ones. All conferences can be revived if given enough time and activity. (Unless you can freeze a whole conference?) I like the idea of being able to view the conferences with recent activity.
Of what significance is it to a user that a conference is "active" or not if the subject of the conference is of no interest - and if it is, any user can make that conference active?
The concern with the dormant conferences is that when a new user reads through them and sees that the last post was sometimes in 1999, and further, if he comes across ultiple conferences like these, he's apt to dismiss the whole of bbs as a dead feature that is no longer used. Also - can we do something about the conferences who's FW's ar eno longer grex users? Either give them toother FW's or retire them or something?
I'd suggest an option that lets you get a list of the top ten conferences in terms of activity, when you log in. I suspect that would drive more traffic out to those conferences.
M-Net tried that at one point. How did it work out?
Anyone that enters a new and interesting post in almost any item in almost any conference, no matter how old the last response was, will get a response back. What does create a little humor is a response to an obsolete subject, but few newusers do that.
Re #40: It had a slight effect for the brief period we did it, but the main
problem is that it was manually generated every week or so (Leeron
might remember, because I think he generated it). I'm talking about
something that's automatic and up to the minute -- similar to how
some web-based BBSes (e.g. phpBB) list threads in order of most
recent activity.
Incidentally, phpBB blows the doors off Backtalk, but I don't know
whether it would scale for the number of conferences and items Grex
or M-Net has. I suspect it wouldn't, because the one php site I've
seen with a truly massive amount of content was very slow.
Anyway -- have it generated automatically, viewable at login and
on demand, and see what happens.
Yep, that is the sort of thing I was getting at in item 19 (response 139,146). Better tools to help people know where the action is on a given day.
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Re #23 (tod): To get your session to drop when you log out, instead of going back to the login prompt, put the line /--------------------------\ | stty hupcl | | /----------------------\ | | | in your .login file. | | | \----------------------/ | \--------------------------/
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Re resp:29: I'd hate to see old stuff weeded out. I find the old discussions in the micros conference really interesting, for example. It's easy to forget what things were like when 386 desktops were new and cost $10,000. ;> Re resp:34: Part of the problem is conferences that appear dead are often just dormant. A lot of conferences that don't get much activity are in my cflist. They might be dormant for months but then someone will post something that sparks a lively discussion. If you move conferences like that to the "dead pile" you just kill them off by ensuring they'll never be active again. Re resp:38: I'm not sure how anyone could get the idea that bbs is dead that way, seeing as they generally have to come in through agora first. I think the current scheme of having a main conference that gets rolled over on a regular basis to stay fresh, and a bunch of other conferences that mostly archive their content forever, is a pretty good one. I think what richard has is a solution looking for a problem. We aren't, incidentally, the only site that works this way. LiveJournal does not remove dormant journals. They move them to a seperate cluster, for load balancing reasons, but they're still accessable. Way back up there someone suggested SSL support for the web interface. I'd like to see that, too, but we'd have to think carefully about the performance impact. It may be a bit steep even for NextGrex.
HOw do I change to pine?
Try "pine" at the % prompt.
Katie uses "/b" as her login shell. "!pine" should work a little better for her.
Can dead items be moved from the current confernce to
it's companion 'old'conference?
Say like the music to grex by and the on stage items in
music should get linked to oldmusic, then the link destroyed in
the current conference. That way you don't get the stark
barren wasteland of a empty new cf, when one is restarted.
That's an interesting idea. To me, a conference covers a period of time, like a checkbook register. When it gets filled, it's replaced with a new one. Still, I can see the value of having a conference with just "current" items, and another with "past" or "archive" items. The drawback, though, is that then the conference loses the serendipity of someone seeing an old item with new eyes. Even for things like "Grexers on Stage", the old items show us a facet of someone that we might not otherwise see, especially if they only perform once or twice.
You have several choices: