valerie Jan 8 04:48:39 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:449 responses total.
I think probably the best thing for the intro conference might be to make it a "voluntary" conference (ie making the default agora once gain), and steer people towards it?
Last I heard, new users were asked which one they wanted, so it's sorta voluntary now. My idea for the Intro conference was that the f-w(s) would be very aggresive about making sure that the items were active, and items that became inactive would quickly be replaced. Having an Intro conference with months-old items is no improvement over the dozens of other confs with no activity, and it's actually worse if we're billing this as "a sampler of what Grex is really like". Though it pains me to say it, I'd rather see new users shoved into the chaos of Agora than be put in a dead conference.
I blush to admit that I've still never actually read any of intro, except for a little bit right at the begining. That said, from what I've heard and seen, it might be better to dump them back into agora.
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should dump new users into a conference menu which lists the cconfs. As I suggested in previous item, such a menu is more workable if dead, dormant, repetitive subject matter and no/absent fw confs are elimninated or merged by cfadmin. I suggested cfadmin set aside a 60 da period and have every fw submit a renewal request for their conf. This will make it obvious which ones to kill and could help cfadmin encourage mergers of others.
I (surprise, surprise) totally disagree 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.
A conference menu which is presented to new users doesn't *have* to list dead or decaying conferences. The menu could even have an entry call "The Graveyard" which would lead users like Catriona into the byways of cyberarchaeology. Let me rephrase this a bit. We should come up with a "consensus" list of most-active-conferences and offer this as a recommended list or menu to new users. Doing this has no implications about any other conferences.
Thanx for taking off the wrapper, valerie!
#7...yeah, a default cflist could be drawn up of the four or five most popular confs and instead of dumping folks into agora, dump them into a *preset* cflist that *starts* with Agora. Make it clear that they can change the .cflist at any time. \But what would be the default .cflist? 1. Agora 2. Arts 3. Sports 4. Cinema 5. Books Agora plus four good confs that just about anyone would have interest in...or myabe the four most popular could be in the default? In this way every new user would see more than just agora...they'd see several confs automatically. This is worth trying.
I have to disagree with a preset list of cf's. For example, of those 5, I read Agora, and might be talked into reading Books. I most likely will never read any of the others. If I had gotten that list as a representative of Grex instead of finding out my own favorites, I might not be here today.
I agree. It would be better to create a simple to use presentation of all the conferences from which the user is encouraged to create an initial .cflist. For example, number all the cfs, and have the system request the user to make an initial choice of cfs by number.
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hmm..so what we're getting at is a menu screen that new users would see giving them an umbered list of the most popular confs (numbered list) and asking them to orprompting themto create a .cflist right off thebat? might be worth a try..
Rane has my idea in #11: except that, by default, I would limit the conference options presented to new users to maybe 10-20 "healthy" conferences, with a bottom option to "list all confs."
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But just dumping into agora didnt work, thats why Intro was started. going back to what didnt work wont work again. Maybe the "other conferences on grex" agora item can be made into a public file, so by typing !confs, they can or new users can get the file where the other fair witnesses talk about their confs. This way it woulnt jus tbe stuck of in agora where it can be easily missed.
Dumping people into Agora, while a bit overwhelming, has worked both here and on many similar systems over the years. I think the menu idea is a good one, though. Is it feasible to have an option to see comments about a conference from the menu? For instance: Conference Comments Homme ^h <Alt h> Femme ^f <Alt f> Cooks ^c <Alt c> kids ^k <Alt k> Where the control command puts you into the conference and the Alt command gives you a paragraph or two (as in the "other conferences" item) and maybe a number of new responses in the last 30 day or last date of a new response? It seems like that would be very usable for new folks, but I don't know how feasible it is technically.
But dumping people into agora *hasn't* worked here...it doesnt get many people into the other confs. It is done like that because it is theasiest option. The menu option is a better idea.
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Dumping people into Agora has always worked fine - for getting more of the kind of people who like Agora. >8)
Well, yes, that's true Rob. Anyone likely to be easily overwhelmed would be frightened off by Agora, so we've selected for people with too much time on their hands. <g> (Who me?) That's why I like the idea of trying the menu idea -- there are quieter conferences to start in and maybe a specialty conference is just the place to start new folks. But only if they choose it, I think.
The other conferences, most of which haven't been restarted in a while, can be equally overwhelming. If someone is dropped into agora early in a season, it's rather easy to get into. It's hard to break into crowded conferences, though, particularly if you don't know what items are dead and what items still warrant responses.
The beauty of conferencing, though, is that a new response can bring a long-dormant item back from the dead. I've seem numerous instances.
re 17:
That exact implementation wouldn't work, for some boring technical
reasons I won't go into, but there are several very similar ways to do teh
same thing that would work quite well. It's a good idea.
Indeed, #23, as many people just hit "read" in a certain conference. Everything new that shows up appears to them.
In fact, if they use a .cflist, they just say "next" and it skips the conference if nothing is new. But if there are interesting new postings, they'll see them and respond.
What if Agora item 1 became the "other conferences" item? Then we dump new users into Agora, and even if they hate it they still see a list of active conferencs.
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wouldnt it be confusing if item #1 wasnt the welcoming item though? I'd think it would be disorienting to go into a conf and not see the firstitem describing the conf.
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Works for me. Make sure that it's frozen soon, so that it's not too long to be overwhelming
As long as one of the first responses a new and unknowing reading would get to is one that explains how to interrupt reading a thread and move to another response, item, or conference, then it wouldn't be necessary to have special items listed first which are frozen with a tightly controlled content thread. Valerie almost always enters just such a response. I think some of what is being suggested here is well intentioned but probably not necessary or even helpful if we it means we start having drift police or more frozen (moderated) items.
As a new user, I'm still feeling my way around the conferences slowly. It's true for me, that some of these are quite off-putting. I've been a Grex user for over a year, and a member for several months now, and today is the first I've ventured into coop. There just isn't enough time to wade through the backlog of old response in a new conference. Why aren't dead items reaped? Evan in the classified conference, where #0 claims that items will be removed in ## days, I had to wade through _years_ of old stuff. Is there a form of the 'fixseen' command that will filter everything before a given date? I haven't found it, so I find myself repeatedly doing 'q' then 'since mm/dd/yy' for every item. Even backtalk, where I can see a menu of the items in a conf, doesn't tell me which items have recent activity. Some enhancements to bbs that would make it more inviting to at least this new user: 1) open with a menu of available conferences, giving name & recent traffic volume stats on one line, with option to join or read description. If the user has a .cflist, follow that first, then present the global menu... Maybe sort the list by traffic volume, so that the lonely ones are on the first page. 2) On the top of the editor panel, as the user is entering a new response, place the title of the current item, and the reminder to stay on topic or start a new item. 3) At the respond or pass? prompt, give an option to respond offline to the submitter's mailbox. This might reduce the volume of off-topic chatter we have to page through. 4) At the OK: prompt after finishing reading a conference, give the option to add this conference to one's .cflist
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Some of those idea may find their way into backtalk.
I'm not sure how suggestion (3) in #33 would work in practice, since an item usually has several contributors. At the "Respond or pass" prompt, any one of them could conceivably be someone you'd want to send mail related to the item. Note that you can always send mail to anybody at the "Respond or pass" by typing "!mail <whoever>", so in effect the mail feature is already there. Hm, this seems to be the "future of the Intro conference" item. It hasn't been active for a while. Did we reach a decision on this issue? Is the Intro cf still an option as the default conference for newusers? Is anybody maintaining the conference?
Of course, we all know that "read since mm/dd/yy" isn't Y2K compliant... ;-)
actually , you don't even need the bang (!) at the respond or pass prompt to mail someone.
Actually, "read since mm/dd/yy" is Y2K. PicoSpan wraps dates more than 50 years in the past to the next century; hence "read since 5/1/20" means everything entered after 2020.
So in 2041, we will start having things entered on grex wrap to 2091?
Gads! Sounds like a serious problem to me!
No. Through the end of 1999 references to dates like 1/5/41 will be wrapped to 2041. Then after the start of the year 2000 Marcus's wrap logic presumably won't be used again for another 50 years. Any reference to 1/5/41 will be simply assumed to be in the current century, thus 2041. In the year 2051 however, the wrap logic will come into its own again, and any references to dates like 3/14/00 will be wrapped to mean the year 2100, not the year 2000. At least that's the way I'd expect it to work from what Marcus said. Backtalk's approach is a little different. From the context of the usage, Backtalk will interpret ambiguous dates as either past or future dates. In a "read since" context, the date should always be in the past, so any ambiguous date is interpreted as the most recent possible date. So "read since Wednesday" means the begining of the day on the most recent Wednesday and "read since 4/6/99" means since 1899, not 1999.
I happen to think that "fixed windowing" or other algorithms of mapping 2-digit years to 4-digit years and claiming to be "Y2K compliant" is BS. It might be sufficient for a business's or application's needs, but it still relies on assumptions that aren't needed with 4-digit dates.
Yes, but four digit dates, where they can be avoided, are really awful from the user interface standpoint. There's a balancing act there.
Actually, Picospan's 50 year wrap formula is relative to the current
date. So the only time it doesn't apply is dates such as 1950, 2050,
etc. Even this is somewhat mythical since Unix dates are 32-bit
quantites--and it's even a bit worse since some versions of Unix,
including apparently this version of SunOS, think dates are signed, so
the bete noir date is Jan 18, 2038. Try these commands in PicoSpan to
see what happens:
date 1/7/48
date 1/8/38
date 0x 7fffffff
date 0x 80000000
date 7/1/48
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Ah, thanks. I'd forgotten that change had been made.
is it also true that newusers are automatically putin the bourne shell? or is the shell option still the choice fo the user? at a newusers house, ctrl-z from Ok: killed the session ....great puzzlement for a while. and then, to avoid 'surprises' will chsh work right ...including adding a .cshrc file to the user's space?
Newuser offers a choice of shells. Chsh sets up appropriate dot files for a user.
You have several choices: