Should conferences on Grex be open to search engines? Doing so would open us up in a new way and possibly bring in participants. I'd suggest this start with only new conferences or freshly restarted conferences and, except for agora and coop, only with the agreement of the conference fairwitness. Any conference that is indexed would state this on the conference login screen. What do you think?38 responses total.
No.
I wonder if there is a way to set up an experimental conference on Grex. I can imagine one with conduct guidelines (no harassment or personal attacks and no graffiti). One where the moderator was expected to remove posts that didn't follow the guidelines and could ban user-ids. One that was searchable. I'd like to see Grex offer the kind of conferencing experience that people have come to expect, while still maintaining our Freedom of Speech ribbon. But perhaps the time has come to segregate the Shoot-Out forums from the Symphony forums. At the symphony, people who firmly believe in free speech can still come together for an experience that has lots of rules and expectations. The orchestra itself is extremely rules driven, and the audience has a fairly high level of agreed-upon behavior. Outside, guns can blaze until the US Marshals arrive. But inside a group of us who want to behave in a certain manner can enjoy our afternoon of harmony, no matter what the guys are doing down at the corral.
This response has been erased.
(I scribbled #3 due to an editing snafu. Here it is again, corrected:) Re #1: Why? Grex needs to be more visible on the web, less of a walled garden. Are we trying to hide? I wouldn't support making items *retroactively* indexable by search engines, since people posted there with the understanding that it wouldn't be. But for new and restarted Agoras, Coops, and other conferences at their discretion - sure, why not? I think it would benefit Grex to be more visible on the web, to be easier for folks to find, to join the global conversation. Consider a technical conference like "web" or "programming", or even "kitchen" - if a Grex item showed up for somebody doing a Google search on a topic like "ruby on rails" or "unix shell" or "bento boxes", they might check it out, join Grex, become part of the community. We need ways to attract more users, and it seems to me that search engine indexing of Grex content would be a very powerful mechanism for doing so. To the extent that Grex has an educational mission, indexing the conferences would be right in line with it. I wouldn't favor the suggestion in #2 of tying indexability to moderation, though. By the way, it would be technically easy to implement this proposal, with a minor tweak or two to Backtalk being the only programming involved.
re #0: No. re #4: > Why? Grex needs to be more visible on the web, > less of a walled garden. Are we trying to hide? Hide? No. Balance public participation vs. personal privacy? Absolutely yes. We've had several vivid examples of people on Grex realizing, to their regret, that they had shared too much personal information about themselves. I already self-censor my comments to a substantial extent because of privacy concerns. If I expected my conversations to be Googleable forever it's doubtful I'd ever participate openly in a political or religious discussion here or share details about my personal life again.
As is often the case, mike said it better than I probably would have.
Most of the long-timers here evolved in a world where it seemed like a good idea to put their real identities online. With ~20 years experience, most of the world is deciding that this is NOT a good idea for informal social chat forums, or for a significant number of political forums. If I understand correctly, LiveJournal has a solid policy against using individual names. One would have to view everything written on Grex through the lens of every prospective future employer. If you want to put Grex 2 on Google, then it should be with a full reboot, down to the user name level.
I agree with Ken. I don't like the idea of making grex crawlable by the search engines. But if this is what Grex does, please somebody hand me a script so I can scribble everything I've ever posted and I'll create a new username.
Yeah. I say things here that I wouldnt say on my blog or someplace else that is indexed by google. Now, I can see the benefits of making conferences searchable but if that were the case, I really do think it should be with a fresh start as Ken suggests. Then I would need a totally different user name and screen name etc. It isnt even that I have shared anything inappropriate but I like to use grex to vent sometimes and while I know it is a risk, I would like to continue to do that but I dont need folks googling my rants about them ;)
Well, I think people here are under the impression there is more privacy on Grex than really exists. Really. A quick Google search on both Nathan Harmon and Mike McNally brings up links to Grex. Like, on the first page of hits. Anyone wanting to read your posting has only to log in to Grex, anonymously, and wade through some conferences. Most of us here are seasoned internet users. We know that what you write anywhere on the internet is out of your control. Really. If it's been read by anyone - it's no longer yours. I'm always so surprised to see how people don't get this. So we can pretend it's not true and watch our community shrink or we can be aware, cautious, AND make Grex more visible.
Looks like it's time to break out the Valerie script then.
Hey, let's not overreact. The proposal is to permit conferences to *opt* to allow web crawlers, not impose it on all conferences, and certainly not allow it retroactively for existing posts. Any indexable conferences would be clearly identified as such. I don't know about LiveJournal's policies, but there are a several mailing lists that I subscribe to in which people use their real names and whose archives are indexed by search engines. Frankly, if the "web" and "jellyware" conferences were accessible by search engines, and therefore capable of reaching a wider audience than a small number of Grex users, it would make me *more* inclined to post in those conferences, not less. Under my real name, of course. And the greater visibility might serve to attract more users to Grex who would be valuable participants in our community. I can understand that folks might not want certain types of discussions indexed. One could debate whether Coop or Agora should be indexed. But the proposal is not to expose everything on Grex to web crawlers. Icertainly think that the potential benefits are substantial enough that someone should be able to run a new conference in Google-searchable mode if they want to. People uncomfortable with that wouldn't have to participate in such conferences. Like I said recently in another item, I think Grex should be open to running different conferences under different rules. We might learn something.
re #10: Can you post the exact query string you are using? I can't find any Grex links in the first several pages of Google results when I Google "Mike McNally" or "Michael McNally". In fact the only results I get that are for me (as opposed to some other Mike McNally -- it's not a very uncommon name) are to the friends' site where my photos are hosted.
It was either "Mike McNally Ketchikan" or "Mike McNally computer". Cool about your running for council, Mike. You would have done a nice job.
Hmmm.. Strange. I tried both "Mike McNally Ketchikan" and "Mike McNally computer" and didn't find a hint of Grex in the first 3 pages of search results (I stopped checking after that.)
It's about 2/3 of the way down the first page I'm given searching for "Mike McNally computer"on Google. It's a link to Grex Staff Notes: Introduction on cyberspace.org .
Again, thinking like that potential employer, I did a Goggle search on "Lynne Fremont job dissatisfaction". About half way down the first page - a hit for The Lynne Show (part 2). The news is not good. ;-) Grex is being slowly strangled. I'm just trying to figure out if it's for a good reason.
Interesting. I didn't find that on the first page of search results until I changed the preferences to show 20 results per page. What's strange is that I had previously looked through the first three pages of results (which should have been the top 30 hits) and not found any mention of Grex.
The funny thing is that I am pretty sure that my current employer *did* google me before hiring me. ;)
I bet Google googles its new employees!
i read that the neo nazis are angry google observed the 50th anniversary of sputnik but won't cowtow to operation iraqi freedom(islam)
The issue of opening up the conferences to search engines was discussed here two years ago. See item 269 in the "oldcoop" conference (item:coop13,269). It's interesting to read that and see the change in attitudes between then and now. There were reservations then too, but on the whole, the idea was greeted more favorably, with generally more perception of the plusses and less concern about the minuses. The number of participants in the previous discussion indicates to me that there are a lot fewer people reading Coop now than then. This is not good. The old item was posted by Jan Wolter, who stated that opening up everything to Google and other search engines would be trivial (this it true; no programming required) and that opening *selected* conferences would be difficult but probably possible. I'm not sure it would even be all that difficult; haven't thought it all the way through, but one might be able to implement this with some changes to our Apache configuration, without having to modify Backtalk at all. The plusses still seem to me to outweigh the minuses.
re 0 ... ummm, no. gavie it a second's thought too
I'm dropping this one. Last one out turn off the lights, please.
I still think this is an issue worth considering. It is something significant enough that I think it should be a change made by a member vote though.
It would most certainly have to go to the membership for a vote. But I don't think there is anywhere near the necessary support. C'est la vie.
Why not proceed to Grex II, intentionally designed for the web?
This response has been erased.
I'm not sure I see what that would do for Grex. If our community wants to stay insular, then Grex II wouldn't serve a purpose. And there are already lots of interesting communities out there with mostly open forums, so starting a new one from scratch, to mimic an old one? (Mary yawns.) Something new, and fresh, taking what we've learned and applying it to WWW? Cool. I've heard some ideas that are intriguing - John has mentioned a few here. But it would look nothing like Grex for the most part. Grex has been done.
Instead of internet, I'm hearing a new term "interwebs". What would Grex look like on the interwebs? (let me put my vote in right now for "able to edit your own posts,forever"). I'm in several communities that allow that, and boy does it feel clunky to be back in the "mistakes and all, forever" mode.
http://xkcd.com/181/
Re. 30 is very funny.
Re #30: I think the reason for not allowing editing of posts is to prevent people involved in a debate from being able to say "I never said that" when they really did. Of course, they can always scribble a post, but that leaves behind the evidence that it was once there, even if the contents themselves are lost, so those denials are less credible. Back when I first started BBSing, many of the BBS's I used were on 8 bit systems with no hard drive, and things didn't hang around for a decade or more. A couple of weeks or a month, in most cases, and it was gone. These Unix systems may have been different, but they weren't the norm. That fact has to be taken into consideration when doing anything like making things available to google searches, or making them editable, at least after they've been read by others. Usenet posts have never been editable, but then, editing thousands of copies on servers throughout the world would be a lost cause, anyway.
Well, USENET has "supercede" which is sort of like edit, but it wasn't widely used nor universally supported. The widespread practice of quoting in that medium means editing would be of limited value anyway.
The communities that I frequent that do allow editing do not allow users to delete anything but the content of the post. They also have a "version" indicator that shows when the post was first entered, and when it was last edited, and whether the edit was by the poster or a moderator. One of them is Wizards of the Coast, which is frequented by Magic-players and Dungeon and Dragons players, most of whom are argumentative teen aged boys. I've never seen evidence of "bait-and-switch", "I never said that" bits. It seems like the most likely community to engage in that activity. Does anyone hang out in an editable community where this is a problem?
Are you an argumentative teenaged boy, C. S. ?
re $0 .. no, thak you anyway.
IIRC the thing that "turned the tide" last time was a "trick" that made the postings of those who wished to not be identified somehow. Dunno if a similar trick would work for google indexing.
You have several choices: