valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:20 2004 Val valerie Jan17 responses total.
I can think of another reason not to do it - dealing with problem users, and in particular, spam. It seems fairly clear that usenet is infested with them. Another factor to consider is that I am not sure that usenet news people will actually contribute all that much to grex. Usenet news readers have a very different interface, and people used to the funky "vi-like" character interface of the various news readers aren't going to appreciate or like PicoSpan. Historically, another reason to offer usenet news was to attract people who would pay $ (ie, a "necessary evil/cash cow"), but I'm not sure that scenario is valid anymore.
News is rather resource intensive, even if we aren't running our own news server. It's also pretty cheap to get access to it from a commercial provider, so I'm not sure I see that much of a reason for Grex to be providing it. Then agian, if we don't carry any of the alt.sex or alt.binaries groups, my experience watching other news servers says that most of the people who read news will either get bored and go away, or bombard the staff with requests for groups such as alt.sex.preteen, or alt.binaries.erotica.pictures.pregnant (yes, at work a customer called up and asked us to add that last one at one point, and then asked us not to tell his wife about it).
He was going to surprise her, I guess.
I try to follow a few Usenet groups: radio.amateur.antenna and such. There is a lot of shaft and little wheat even in these groups. I also use altavista's usenet search capability as sort of a consumers guide. It has been very useful at times.
So what if we make it a members only service?
On the minus side, I'm not enthusiastic about increasing the number of
members-only services.
On the plus side:
- administratively it would be easier to deal with problem users if they
have been validated.
- it might be a revenue generator.
- it means fewer users and less consumption of Grex resources for issues
not central to Grex's mission.
It's worth noting that all users can probably already read and post news from
Grex. I'm sure you can find a way to read news via lynx (someone must have
put news on the web), and I know you can post via E-mail. What we are talking
about is making it easier and more convenient.
We could also consider requiring validation, but not necessarily membership.
Or restricting direct posting (as opposed to posting via E-mail) but not
reading.
Personally, I'm not very enthusiastic about encouraging use of news on Grex.
Unless it served some other benefit, like bringing in money, I'm not sure
I'd be happy to see it.
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If grex is to have usenet again, make it open and available post and read access without validation for everyone...this is what nether does and it brings it lots of users. Insisting on validation for any aspect ofv usenet usage is paranoia and an invitation to needless bureacracy. Either have Usenet all the way or dont have it atall.
I would prefer not to see the resource drain (machine and human) of News on Grex.
The policy decided on some time back was to allow everyone to read usenet and allow validated users to post. Posters wouldn't have to pay anything, they'd just have to identify themselves. All of this was decided by official member vote, so it would take another vote to overturn it. As to whether Grex should support Usenet news at all -- a few years ago, I'd have said definitely yes. Now, I look at it as one more administrative chore for a staff that is already overextended. At some point we have to take a look at putting some limits on what we try to do.
Sad to say, I agree with the folks who say that Usenet seems like a strain out of proportion to its benefit to GREX.
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Seems like it's a bit too much to me, too.
(Re #11: At some point I did, I guess. Well, in the teaching game you learn that repetition never hurts.)
I thought the argument for usenet was that having it could bring more people into grex's conferencing. Items from usenet could be linked into grex's confs and vice versa, or grex could even have its own local usenet confs. If the purpose of grex is conferencing, than isnt usenet something that be as worthwhile to offer to everyone as Picospan is?
One of the reasons I got involved with Grex in the first place was because I found usenet so frustrating. The major problems were that 1) The signal to noise ratio is way low. Just within a single response, you have a big long header section, a big long quote from several previous responses (giving the entire history of the thread), a tiny bit of new content, and a big long signature. And most responses are uninteresting anyway. 2) I never got much of a sense of community there. It always seemed to me that people came and went too frequently, that I never got to know anything about the posters, and that egos got in the way a lot. A lot of people ask questions but never give answers, and ask that answers to their questions be mailed to them because the don't read the group very often. We have some of the same problems here, of course, in minature, but there are also people who care about Grex very much, and take a lot of time to keep things nice around here. I guess I think of the difference between Grex and usenet kind of like the difference between a church and a mall. People go to both, but the one is a place to form a community and the other is not. So in answer, Richard, my opinion is that the "purpose of Grex" (which can certainly not be summed up as tersely as you have said it) and the reality of usenet do not overlap very much. But that's just my opinion.
I agree, Mark. I read Usenet, but I don't see it as the same sort of thing at all. I tend to go to Usenet not for community but for information exchange on very specific topics that wouldn't have enough interest to maintain themselves on a small system like GREX. If it didn't cost GREX anything (mostly I'm thinking workhours for staff here) I'd say Usenet would be an OK but irrelevant addition to GREX. Our expereince was, though, that people were coming to staff with Usenet problems, requests for new newsgroups to be added, etc, and that it took up a whole lot of bandwidth in general. In my opinion, the best way to use Usenet to bring people to GREX is to put the URL in your sig when you go out on the net. It's a cool name and it's brought attention before.
I would prefer not to have Usenet available from grex for any of us, memeber, non-member, validadeted or not. Staff is struggling to find free time for Grex as it is, and adding to their work-load does not seem very smart. Quite frankly, I dont miss it.
You have several choices: