A long time member of Grex recently told me that s/he had decided not to renew
his/her membership. When I asked if there were problems with Grex that
influenced the decision, the member sent me this:
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The thing that bothers me the most is the quality of the dialog in the
conferences. I would really enjoy conferences if they were entertaining
or informative. It seems the things that bother me the most lately are:
1. Little or no activity in the conferences other than Agora. Some of
these conferences could be great if we had a critical mass of
interested people.
2. A large number of people who are active in conferences do not want
information sharing. This majority seems to want to dominate, not
interact.
3. Some seem to want to pontificate or correct everyone else. I know
this is natural in a group, but after a while it is predictable and
boring.
4. There are some really interesting people whose style is to encourage
open dialog, but these are too few.
5. I am older than most on Grex, and perhaps there is too much generation
gap.
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I asked the member if it was OK to post these reasons in an item in Coop
so that they may be discussed in public, and s/he agreed.
58 responses total.
This was my response: I have some of the same problems with the current state of affairs myself. A lot of people are worried about the fact that most conferences seem to lack participants, but no one seems to know quite what to do about it. I do know of one success story in that area, though: Ken Josenhans has systematically recruited people on and off Grex to join the music conference, and has achieved a critical mass which allows for some good discussion. (I don't regularly read music myself, so I'm going by what he's told me.) So it seems to me there is at least one way to promote intelligent participation, but it takes a lot of work. I agree that this is a big problem, and that we need to keep the conferences lively and intelligent if we are going to keep Grex alive.
How about dropping bbs users into a conference menu instead of a conference? Once they are done with their selected conference, put them back into the conference menu to select the next conference. One of the menu items could be to go through a .cflist. To attain critical mass, perhaps conferences need to broaden their view and others removed so there are fewer of them. Divide and conquer, as they say. I find the controlling people item to be of interest. I can't say I've noticed that but that could be because I'm one of them? Something to think about.
I think everyone here knows why I've cut back so much on my conferencing.. >8) Now that I think about it, the conferencers that I considered interesting all left at about the same time I did. But of course, the flood of wonderful people who discover Grex through anonymous Backtalk access should be coming in any day now, right?
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There are more intelligent discussions on Grex than I have time to keep up with as it is, so I'm not sure how increasing the number of such discussions would benefit me personally, and I don't see the problem that other people to seem to see. To respond to the specific points raised in #0: 1. There's good activity in a number of conferences other than Agora. 2. As long as I've been involved in conferencing there's been a certain number of people who want to dominate, not discuss. I think that the open conferencing format tends to attract such people, so that's probably inevitable. So long ago I made the decision to live with that and to shrug off such people when I encounter them. For the most part I've been successful at this. Grex is a lot better off in that respect that a lot of places. See any number of Usent newsgroups for worse examples. 3. See 2. 4. Could always use more interesting people, but I don't see a serious deficit. 5. Not only am I older than most on Grex, I'm older than most who are older than most on Grex. Doesn't bother me. Maybe fw's could advertise the conference they fw more. Maybe users could advertise the conferences they participate in more. There are limits on how effective this can be, however, depending on the conference. Ken's done a fine job publicizing the music conference, but it's also true that "music" is one of the easier sells -- everybody listens to music, everybody has opinions on it. Guess I don't see things as broken. I tend to agree with Valerie that the Intro conference hasn't worked out as hoped and that we should go back to Agora as the default for all newusers.
I agree that Intro should be ditched.
As to the lack of participation in the "specialty" conferences,
I have asked for some systematic data before about how many people
are participating. Nobody has been able to show that there has
been either an increase or a decline in specialty conference partici-
pation. Lots of people have said, though, that their *perception*
is that there is less activity.
One of the things M-Net has done to increase participation
in these conferences is to post a two-line "ad" for a conference
in the Message of the Day. The ad stays there for two or three
weeks. M-Net's experience is that typically 20-50 people are
attracted into a conference while its ad is running.
The *real* problem with increasing conf'ing activity is the same as it has been all along...grex is too slow. It takes a significant committment of time to keep up with even one or two confs here, reading every new item every day. Twenty new response items in Agora can take an hour on a bad day. Most people arent that patient. They dont want to sit staring at the same screen for more than a few seconds. Many users who come here have already been spoiled by other places on the 'net that have high speed connections. Bottom line is that unless you know someone here, unless you REALLY like the confs here, you dont have a reason to conf here. There are easier and faster places to conf throughout the 'net that h ave comparably high levels of dialogue. If Backtalk worked at an optimal level, it would have solved this to an extent because people could conf without having to telnet in and lag. But it is often slower than reading confs through picospan right now.. Also I must repeat that the casual user who telnets in and sees themselves 20th or 25th in line, will go away. The countdown cue might be a technically good thing but it is repressive and it hurts conferencing here. If you want the casual user to stay here andparticipate in conferences, you have to provide the wayfor them to do so expeditiously. Personally, I think the Intro conf is/was a good idea, but its moot because people who have to wait ten minutes in a countdown cue and then lag for thirty minutes just to read the conf, arent going to be around. They are going to leave because theydont have any committment to grex and a million other places they can try. Make grex faster. No other solution is going to work until thathappens.
I don't want to attract casual users, I want to attract people who want to join our community. We need more conferencers, so we can get more members, before we can make Grex faster.
I feel Grex is doing a wonderful job of being open and censorship-free with a minimum of rules. We tend to have a nice mixture of discussion, from inane to quite informative, to simply supportive. I don't tend to see much of what other folks refer to as controlling people. Maybe you only see them if you tend to feel vulnerable to being controlled. ;-) For those who feel there isn't a whole lot of interesting discussion - maybe you simply login too often. Honestly. It could be that simple. This isn't USENET.
I'm frustrated with the speed too. It's not a financial issue or a number of users issue at this point, really. It's a staff time issue. We, me included, really need to put some time into getting the 670 going. The next step should be a faster Net connection, but that seems to be falling into place.
(The Intro conf is still around, and nobody's maintaining it??? PLEASE delete the stupid thing...)
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On the speed issue, the terminal server may be reasonably stable now. If that's true, and Marcus can modify the queuing logic in telnetd, then we could put more lines on that, and let people make ppp connections to Grex (though not to the rest of the internet). This would give local Ann Arborites a reasonably fast backtalk connection. That's a pretty easibly reachable technological improvement that we may be able to capitalize on to publicize our conferences locally more. I think we should probably turn intro off for a while, and see if we are more successful getting new people into the conferences. Since we started that, we've been less successful, but there are so many other factors that it is hard to be sure that intro is the cause. Currently when you join a new new conference, Picospan makes the first and last items "new" while the rest are "unseen". Backtalk makes all items new. Backtalk's approach stinks. In many conference you will start by seeing many items that have been dead for years before you seen any activity. Picospan's approach is a lot better. The first time in the conference, you see only two items. If you come back, you see only items that are active, that have been responded to since you last were there. This does a much better job of making a conference with a large backlog of old items look more lively. But what if people don't come back a second time? This approach kind of misses the first chance to grab their attention, in hopes of getting them the second time around. What I think I'd like to have Backtalk do is, when people first join a conference, mark the first item and all other items that have had activity in the last week as "new" and mark the others as "unseen". The time period of a week might be resettable for fairwitnesses, since different values are reasonable for different conferences.
I like that idea.
yeah, me too.
Grex has, literally *TONS* of users! A computer that's faster than Grex is now, will not solve the speed problem simply because there are tons more users waiting in the wings for a faster system. It's sort of like putting a 5 gallon jug under Niagra (sp?) Falls instead of a 1 gallon jug.
The entire conferencing setup needs to be better organized by cfadmin. There are too many dead, dormant or forgotten conferences hanging around. There are confs that have fw's who were reaped years ago. Regardless of whether grex has enough disk space for unlimited confs, it doesnt help grex in *selling* its current confs to have them so disorganized. Cfadmin can get down to a smaller, concise conference listing that can be presented to new users, but it needs to encourage some confs to merge with others with like topics and it needs to ill confs that arent showing activity. For instance, the Safety conf hasnt had a new item since 1994. It doesnt look good for new users to see that conf lying ar ound. Nuke it. Cfadmin should have a minimum standard for confs to stay alive. Two fw's at least one of which is active. At least one new item a month. New users who look around and see dead confs or inactive confs are going to leave. I'd like to see newusers kicked into a mnenu listing of confs, where they can see all that is availavble and choose where to go. But not until everything is cleaned up. What I suggest is that Cfadmin designate a 60 day period in which or during which it asks for an fw to submit a renewal request for each conference. Simply an email stating thte name of the conf, who the fw's are and description of conf would do. State that for renewal, each conf must have at least two fw's. CFadmin at the end of the 60 day period can then kill any conf that has not been re-applied for and can also then suggest mergers that would allow for the elimination of confs that are dead or have repetitive subject matter. It is better to have fewer confs that are solid and active than to have dozens of confs that are just wasted disk space. I have seen other places do such renewal programs every so often. It is needed here.
AS usual I disagree totally with richard. While inactive/dead conferences may not sound like an attraction to new users, in fact they were facinating for me. One can always enter a response, and usually, someone will answer you back. For many of those conferences, there are active lurkers who keep them in .cflist and would be delighted to have some new people enter a question/answer/retort. It certainly adds to Grex's breadth and depth to show all of our conferences. And for those of us who develop interestes in a topic after our first perusal of Grex, it is wonderful to have a resource like old conferences to search through. Indexing, renaming and other organizational changes may make them MORE useable and attractive, but dont archive them in such a way that a newbie cant find them easily. (like you need to know some unix to find old agoras).
I agree with Catriona. Some of those "dead" conferences contain some
very useful information. I seldom notice the dates on responses until
about the 20th page of responses to one item. ("Hmmm, this musta been
going on a while. Yup, 1992."
I'm also one of those who keeps several very quiet conferences on my .cf
list and try always to respond to anything posted there in the hopes of
waking the conference up again. I'd be very sad to see some of my quiet
favorites go.
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Re 21: Me too.
Rather than kill off the dormant, how about if we publicize the vibrant? Let's run an (automated) quarterly survey of all the conferences to check for the number of participants, and the number of items + responses, in the previous quarter. Have a human look over the results to defend against "conference stuffing." Then publicize our most active conferences, the top 20 or so. The results can be posted in Agora, and somehow they can be fed to new users.
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That would be a good foil for afterward publicizing the *least* active conferences. People are always interested in curiosities, but you have to make them curiosities first.
As a counter to #1 and its report on my FW style: the most recent item in the music conference has as its title "The Day The Music (conf) Died." Sigh. Looking at the staff reports, and talking to Steve Andre', brought me to another thought: how much energy could the staff bring to conferencing if they weren't so tied down with Staff Stuff?
I saw that item and was puzzled by it. The music conference is on my cflist and seems to have plenty of new responses every day. It's certainly not my perception that it has "died". I don't know if staff members would conference more if they weren't tied down with staff work. Anyway, I think that there's basically two ways to keep a system like this going: (1) throw money at it, or (2) throw labor at it (or some combination thereof). Since we have little of (1), we're stuck with mostly (2). All contributions will be gratefully accepted.
It's not as bad as that, Ken.. the entree likes to talk quite a bit, and it seems strange to him not to have responses every few hours. It's just a bit slower. It's not dead by any stretch. I'm really good at things involving #2, only I have very little computer experience in relation to everyone else.
Computer experience is not really necessary here. People skills are. We want more people in the confs, and want help in getting people here. Personally, I'm more suited to getting the hardware running rather than getting people into the confs. I, certainly, could use other people help with that.
I have more people skills than computer skills, but that doens't say much :)
I don't know about that, Steve. You seemed pretty civilized when we met the other night. ;)
I'm sure animal could seem pretty civilized if he really, really put his mind to it :)
Re:arubas point #5 I'm younger than most people on grex, it seems, and I also find a lot of the conferences lacking.
Re: pruning the conf tree Confs do not have to totally disappear for us to reduce the number of confs. What *I* would really like to see is for the cfadm (with small group of helpers, perhaps one per catgegory of confs) MERGE confs, with one extra thing from staff (or other programmer): a program that will load every .cflist, and replace "deleted" confs with the "merged" confs. (er, each .cflist) No item is lost (until the "new" confs are restared, of course), and no one loses a conf from his/her .cflist. Is this feasible? Desirable?
You'd also need to merge participation files for the users, I'd say. And off hand I'd say it's a Bad Idea to mess with users' .cflists and participation files without their explicit consent ... in which case you might as well just let the users edit their .cfllists themselves.
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But you still have the problem with participation files. Big pain.
Well, in the specific case valerie mentions, I think everyone who was using rpg or videogames has moved over to amalgam, so I don't know that it'd be a problem.
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Wouldn't the 'fix' command solve that, though?
Technical question: each user has a participation file, or each conf, or each user has one for each conf in which that user participates?
Each user has a separate file for each conference they're in.
Do a !ls -al .cfdir which will show you the participation files in your .cfdir directory.
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Oh! I forgot...I had to make a .cfdir to stuff those files away.
If you have a .cfdir, and begin using a new cf, will the .*.cf file automatically go to that directory, or would that one have to be moved manually, also?
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OK, thanks! I just did that, and checked it, despite my rudimentary Unix.
how is the .cf list used?
A .cflist file is a text file which contains the names of the conferences you regularly visit on Grex, one conference name per line. When you start up picospan, it will go to the first conference in the list. If you type "next" at the "Ok:" prompt, it will go to the next one. If a conference contains no new responses since the last time you visited it, picospan will skip over it. The advantage is that you don't have to always remember the conferences you want to visit each time you log in, and you can keep tabs on quiet conferences without having to go there each session. Sri has also written a ".cflist builder" program, which helps you to create and maintain your .cflist. Someone else better describe that, though.
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My .cflist just stopped working. I log on and find myself in agora (ugh!), and try to go to the "next" conf, but Grex tells me that I am at the end of my list, when I've just started! probably not coincidentally, I also lost paging and the nice response editor at the same time (the one that automatically wraps lines).
Did you just create your .cfdir? Your .cflist and .cfonce files are in your home dir, not in your .cfdir directory. It's a guess - haven't tested it - but I suspect that if .cfdir exists, then picospan expects these files to be there.
I suspect that's it, since lilmo's .cfdir directory has a
date of Dec. 16, but his .cfonce and .cflist files are much
older and they're in his home directory. Picospan is no
longer seeing them; they have to be moved into .cfdir. Try
this from an 'Ok:' prompt:
unix (gets you to a Unix shell prompt)
mv .cfonce .cflist .cfdir (moves the files)
bbs (restarts Picospan)
Things should now be normal.
Won't that leave you with Picospan being run twice? Or is does "unix" exec a shell instead of spawning it?
"unix" exec's a shell, instead of spawning it.
OK, I did that. But it didn't seem to change at the same time I added the new .cfdir directory. I seem to recall that it worked as it had before for several logins. *shrug* I'll go test to see if it worked.
It seems to be working now; thanks!!
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