I was wondering to what degree people think we ought to validate institutional memberships. Right now we simply require that we have either a corporate check or some person's ID. That serves the primary purpose of validation, namely it allows us to find a real person to blame in case someone does something nasty with the account. It occurs to me that the institutional membership class might be used for something other than what it was originally intended for. I'm wondering if people think we should allow this or not. Suppose user John Smith has two accounts, johns and jsmith, and he wants both of them to have internet privileges. Could he pay for a regular membership for johns and an institutional membership for jsmith, using some creative institution name, like "John Smith Enterprises, Inc.", and using a personal ID as validation for both? In other words, should the treasurer make an effort to insure that the institution behind an institutional account acually has some legal existence?96 responses total.
Is there a problem with a user controlling a number of accounts with internet access, but not voting privileges? I would hope that Institutional membership would be of interest to unincorporated clubs, too. If a sewing circle is willing to support grex, is there a reason to demand incorporation? With 14,000 users but only 100 members paying the bills, I think grex should want to accept donations from both individuals and groups willing to support us, so long as "one person one vote" is maintained.
That hasn't been the case up until now. As far as I know, when I asked about paying for two internet access accounts, I was told that I could have *one* paying membership, but not two, and that only a membership would allow the account to have internet access. This has come up several times in the past. And I think we would be remiss in allowing me to get a McGee and Associates institutional membership with internet access, just because I am (and have been) in business for myself for over 15 years. The camel's nose is pushing up the edge of the tent, folks.
Nonsense. What harm would your having two accounts, paid for, with internet access, do to grex? (At the time you asked about having two internet access accounts, wasn't there only one way to do that, with an individual membership?) I would be pleased if McGee and Associates joined grex as an institutional member. Another $60 donation. Thanks!
I wouldn't have a problem with that. After all, Grex di decide at one point that allowing validated acces to the Internet would be OK, but that we currently didn't have the resources.
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I agree with both Rane and Valerie and would hope that any institution or corporation that wanted a membership would be granted a single membership. No matter if they were incorporated or not, non-profit or for profit, the KKK or Save the Nerds.
Re #5(): Say you live in a tent, and your pet camel is staked outside, but wants inside. So, he sticks his nose under the edge of the tent, to see if that is a problem. Then the rest of the head, then the neck, etc, until your camel is sharing the tent with you. Have you ever tried to move a camel where it doesn't want to go? Basically, you don't. So now, the camel lives there. Eh?
Would someone having a problem with Institutional members please describe the camel?
What Rane said. I understood the allusion, but not what it was supposed to apply to. (And I'm not saying I won't agree once something's pointed out. I just don't know what future problem you see.)
Maybe I wasn't clear in #0. There's no question that Colleen may have an
institutional membership in the name of McGee and Associates, a company
which has existed for 15 years. We already have a situation like that,
where one human pays for both a personal membership and an institutional
membership, and provides ID for both. You'll recall that that was what
started the whole fuss which culminated, last July, in the Institutional
Membership Amendment to legitimize the situation.
What I'm trying to point out in this item is that anyone who wants two
*personal* accounts with internet access can now have them simply by
fabricating an institution name. In fact, anyone can have 5 such accounts
by fabricating 4 institution names.
This doesn't violate the one-vote-per-person rule. It could result in
more money for Grex. But it's not what we had in mind when we approved
institutional memberships. (At least it's not what *I* had in mind.) I'm
trying to establish whether we should:
a) Disallow memberships for fictional institutions, and require some
proof of an institution's existence, such as a corprate check.
b) Disallow memberships for fictional institutions, but take a "Don't
ask, don't tell" attitude toward institutional existence.
c) Allow memberships for fictional institutions, and actively
encourage people who want multiple personal memberships to make up
institution names for all but one of them.
Approach 'a' may be a problem if an institution is a (real) club which has
no bank account or legal paperwork. Maybe we could agree to accept a
membership list as ID, or something like that. But this is getting a bit
sticky.
The U.S. military has kindly tested approach 'b' for us and found a lot of
problems with it. For instance, we'd have to decide what to do if we had
it proved to us (or confessed to us) that an institution which held a
membership was fictional. Plus it encourages a degree of tight-lippedness
between Grex members and the Grex board and staff, which is not something
we have ever wanted.
Approach 'c' will probably result in the most money for Grex, but it makes
me a little uncomfortable. If we're going to allow people to have
multiple personal memberships, I wish we could allow them to do it without
subterfuge.
BTW in case anyone's wondering, there have been at least 3 people, as far as I know, who've asked about having multiple accounts with internet access. And Rane, please don't harangue me for saying "multiple personal memberships" in the last paragrah of #10. I should have said "multiple accounts with internet access". Mea culpa.
A whole lot about Grex depends on users doing the right thing by the system on an honor system. Individual membership asks for some proof of identity but we've kept it so easy that if anyone wanted to take out false memberships it would be extremely easy to do. Instead of focusing on how we can make it hard to cheat the system we've put our efforts into recruiting users who respect what Grex is about and trusting each other. Why don't we just extend the same trust to organizational memberships. Make it clear the idea is one membership per organization, encourage organizations to jump on in by making it easy to do so, and trust they'll do the right thing. Should we ever find this trust thing doesn't work then address the specific problem. But so far it's worked real well and is a big part of what makes Grex special.
That doesn't really address my problem, Mary, which is: what do I tell people who ask about having multiple accounts with internet access?
You tell them it is not permitted. One account per person, or per organization. Just as you ask for individual identification, ask for equally valid organization identification. In the case of an organization, a letterhead is often accepted, although nowadays they can be created instantaneously - but I wouldn't worry about it. I agree with Mary that we should work on trust, until we know it has been violated.
I think it is too bad that we called them "institutional" accounts. We should have called them "non-voting" accounts. Then we wouldn't care if it was an intitution or an individual who had it. I for one don't care. Let an individual have an innstitutional account if he or she wants. There's no harm. Just don't let an institution have a voting account, because it flies in the face on one-person, one-vote principle.
I care, because I have (had..) hopes that attracting organizations to support grex would be helpful. I've even gotten a few organizations that use grex to join as institutional members. If the name is dropped, there is less specific identification of these community-supportive organizations, and I expect grex would get fewer. I certainly would no longer try to get organizations to join, if they are mixed in with just a "non-voting" category. That's doesn't seem to give much recognition to a class of supporters.
Well, I for one, am NOT going to pay for a second, non-voting membership with internet access, which I want for personal use, and tell Grex that it is my business account. This is exactly the issue I'm concerned about. Why is is ok for me to do that, but not honestly to tell you folks that the second $60 is for a second personal account? I do want two personal accounts with internet access. Apparently there are other people who want that too. If the concept is ok as long as I pretend that the account is for business or an institution, I as owner of a business, and the president of a not-for-profit with 3 members (legal and viable, but very limited in membership), could legitimately ask for 3 separate memberships. So I can legitimately have 3 accounts if I use my business name, and my not-for-profit name, but not if I use my own name. *Shrug* So the current deal is that I can have 3 accounts, and no one will check my email to see how I'm using them, 'cause you don't want to know whether I've lied? Seems like a weird way to run an "open" system. It appears we have let the camel (multiple personal accounts with internet access) into the tent after all.
This issue is one of the many reasons I've never been comfortable with Grex comining membership and selling Internet access.
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Know if you do that you'll be encouraging a policy which gives those who can afford it more perks. I'd much rather we said something like, we really appreciate your *donating* to a good cause, knowing your *gift* will allow others who maybe can't afford it to be part of our community. We should do what we can to de-emphasize the feeling of members buying specific services. My 2 cents.
Right, the camel here is the concept of "more perks for more money", which is something we've always tried strenuously to avoid. Re #18: The concept of tying internet access to membership was ratified by the members (an official proposal vote) several years ago. I've never been comfortable with it either and voted against the proposal at the time. That said, I'm having a little trouble seeing what substance is at stake on this particular issue. What can a person do with five personal accounts with internet access that they couldn't do with just one?
Re #17: I don't see the problem. So what if you want multiple personal accounts with internet access (for whatever reason). Grex does not offer them. If you want to pretend you are just managing accounts for a lot of fake organizations - well, there are many ways to screw this system, but I just about don't mind because you would be supporting the system more than those 14,000 non-supporters, and you would have to live with the fiction. I'm interested also in the answer to remmer's question in #21.
One person can only reasonably use one account at a time, unless they have multiple computers with separate phone lines, or a large screen with several windows and something layers software. Theoretically, one person could create several accounts and login on separate ttys and tie up the system preventing other users from access, but they don't need outgoing internet access to do that, or to pay any money. What then, is the problem? If someone wants to pay for full membership and/or internet access for multiple accounts, what possible problem could we have with that so long as the 1p1v is maintained? Resource use can't be the issue, because the resources can be used much more extensively by creation of numerous non-member accounts. At least with member accounts there is additional money coming in to Grex. The whole thing boils down to the value of a non-voting membership. What is that value, aside from the internet access? And why do we care if someone pays for multiple representations of that value. It's not like they can be used cumulatively, so nobody really has "more" access just because they have more memberships... Am I missing something here?
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Re #23: "What then, is the problem?" Well, the problem is this. If we allow people to pay for internet access on as many personal accounts as they want, I don't think there's any way we can pretend we're not "selling internet service". Up to now, we call membership fees "donations", and internet privileges "membership perks". I don't see how we can extend that to a situation where people can buy access for as many accounts as they'd like. I don't think we should be in the business of selling internet service. For one thing, I think we'd have to charge sales tax on those extra accounts. And for another, if our attitude shifts away from the donations/perks model toward the sales model, people may start to treat us the way customers treat a provider. That's not what Grex has been like up to now.
I agree with Mark.
Nobody is proposing what Mark describes in #25. The policy is one internet access per member, individual or institutional. I recommend keeping that policy. I'm a case in point, I guess. I maintain four accounts for non-profit organizations (all MI corporations and 3 501(c)3) in addition to my (one) personal account. Three of those organizations are institutional members and the fourth one will be soon. They all use the internet - but only for e-mail, web pages, and ftp from outside, which are all allowed non-members anyway. None use party or a lot of other resources. Am I a camel's nose? 8^} (I just noticed that we already provide *everyone* with most of the internet "perqs" that people might want - add lynx to the list above - ....the additional member internet "perqs" don't amount to much.)
I agree with Mark also.
This doesn't help with institutional users, but is there a way we could use Unix group membership etc. to do the following: Allow a user to establish a "primary" account that would be internet-enabled and vote-enabled given the $ and verification. If that same user wanted internet access as another user, then he'd send staff or whoever an e-mail from his primary account, to add the secondary account to the group of the primary user. That would allow the secondary account to have internet access under the umbrella of the primary account. The downside would be a person who pays for his primary account, then gets secondary accounts for his buddies to use without paying. But if we're supposed to operate in an atmosphere of trust...
Yes, we could do that, and we wouldn't even need to use UNIX groups to accomplish it. The member could just write to me and I'd add the pseudo to the internet group, and keep track of it in my database, so I know to delete it if the membership expires. I confess to being worried about the "add my friends" problem. (We ought to at least put a cap - say 3 - on the number of additional accounts with internet access, and make the member state that the accounts are indeed his.) Re #27: Rane, I think several people were proposing that we allow people to "pay more and get more", which is what I was reacting to. If anyone wants to know exactly what internet privileges we're talking about here, this is what I tell people when they ask me (courtesy of srw): Non-members are forbidden all internet access except via these protocols: finger, gopher, talk, and http. All other internet protocols (such as telnet, ftp, irc, and many more) are reserved for members only. So that's what you gain by being in the internet group.
What Kevin proposes in #29 sounds reasonable; my reservation would be that it's yet another drain on staff time, which is in scarce supply to begin with.
Add to the allowed protocols e-mail and ftp from a remote site. So, why don't you just verify organizations like you verify individuals? The 'proofs' may be a little different, but we decided what was acceptable for individuals, and we can do the same for organizations.
i just didn't see it the way aruba describes it. that makes a lot of sense to me, and given that we do not "sell" internet service, and do not want to, it also makes sense to me to keep the limit we currently have. perhaps we could have institutional memberships for formally organized groups, and ask that informal groups register as essentially the personal account of the contact person/primary user...? hmmm... i see some potential problems with that idea. i guess then what we are left to struggle with is the perception of what we provide and what we are. we could try to authenticate inst'l users, and any who cannot provide some significant authentication can be asked to assign a member of their group as "the person responsible and answerable for any use or abuse of the account." then we can treat that account, for all intents and purposes as an inst'l account. again, we'll have to rely on the good faith of the contact person who creates the account, but since it's not a voting account, i think that as long as we continue to maintain the idea that individual users can only have one account with full access, we don't really lose anything if occasional people want to deceive us and pay us for more.
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For what its worth...the IRS makes a distinction between inexpensive premiums,
such as tote bags, and more significant premiums, such as the cost of a
dinner. There is also a distinction between an incidental premium and a
regular premium. You may get a tote bag for joining some organization, but
you do not usually get them for renewing. You can also not usually take
out two memberships for yourself in most non-profit organizatiions in order
to get a double premium ("one to a customer...").
In any case, I did not think that Grex was offering internet acess as a
perq to members, but rather limiting it to members in order to manage the
resource.
That's what I thought too.
Yep. That's been my understanding of the restriction too.
There are several reasons we restricted some internet access to members
only.
(0) anti-vandalism. Vandals like to find anonymous machines to
use as "jump gates" to hide their actual location, and they
also like anonymous machines when attacking other machines.
(1) accountability/liability. If a non-vandal decides to attack
some other site or person, this allows us to name the person
and pass the buck in terms of responsibility for the problem.
(2) to limit some kinds of use to a scarce resource.
(3) to be a perk for members. This was not the *only* reason why
we did this, but this *was* one of the reasons we originally
setup this restriction.
I don't see a big problem with institutional access, provided it isn't
abused. We certainly need to get a good idea of who is responsible for
the use of the organization - for an incorporated business, this is not
hard. They're registered with some state, and this is something we can
verify - we should also be able to get an address for the principle
office of the organization, & other contact info.
For an unincorporated business, the business itself can't be held
liable; rather, the individual people concerned are completely liable.
So, for an unincorporated business, we need the name(s) of all of the
people who will have access Since there's no difference between this &
somebody just "buying" 2 accounts (so if we allow unincorporated
businesses, we should also allow people to just plain buy 2 accounts
with no need to make up a business name).
There are certainly ways this could be abused, so we should be careful
about this. For instance, we certainly don't want to sell accounts to
"bulk mailers". We don't want institutions to think of grex as a good
place to set up high traffic web sites. We also want to be up front
about voting rights, so that they are not "surprised" later. We also
don't want an institution to think of grex as a respository to store or
exchange private data, say, proprietary trade information.
Or, simply, any serious amount of data.
I am strongly against allowing multiple internet-enabled accounts to users. As long as we are limiting it to one account/vote/internet access per person, I can justify to myself giving Internet access as a perq. (BTW, it was my understanding when we voted on this that is *was not* a perq. It was to limit the use for resource resons. I'm against giving it even as a perq. Even to the point of not allowing it.) However, if we start to allow people to buy as many accounts as they want, then that's selling internet access. We then have an implied contract with out customers. I, personally, don't want to devote my spare time, what there is of it, to maintaining a system that sells internet access. I guess I just have big problems with the idea. So, I'd say we need to verify institutions somehow. I'm not sure how, but to a similar extent as the personal verification.
If we are limiting internet to members primarily for accountability reasons, then it makes sense to allow members to have extra internet-enabled accounts *for personal use* for no extra fee. If we are also trying to limit use of scarce resources, that means we don't want to allow people to give extra accounts away to friends, even if they are willing to take responsibility for the use of the account, because that would unbalance our rather delicate resource equation. Note that if we did this, any user would be able to tell that one particular account had member status but no voting status, so they'd know that it was either a corporate account or a pseudo. It would probably not be a matter of public record which member a pseudo-member account was associated with. I don't know if this would be all that interesting to all that many people. We should not give sell pseudo-member accounts for the full membership price because they don't include what is formally the main "perk" of membership - a vote. We could sell them for some lower price - $6 a year or something. But I don't really feel like that is worth the trouble. I'd be OK with no-extra-charge, for-personal-use-only spare member accounts. I'm not sure if the demand for them would be large enough to be worth the effort of offering them, and the small possiblity of abuse, or the large headaches when we start suspecting that xyz1, xyz2, and xyz3 are actually being used by different people.
Me thinks someone should just go back and repost the original items where this was discussed so our memories could be refreshed. Security isn't tied to $6 a month but rather to validation.
The following is the text of the membership vote which restricted
specific services to members only. A number of reasons for limiting
access are mentioned but I don't see any reference to using these
restrictions as an incentive for folks to send in membership dues.
***************************************
PROPOSAL:
The following internet services enrich the Grex community, do not use
much bandwidth, and do not provide much potential for internet
mischief; therefore they should be made available to all:
Finger
Whois
Ping
Mail (incoming and outgoing)
Incoming Usenet News
Incoming Telnet
Incoming FTP
Incoming Lynx
Talk (and it's various permutations)
Archie
Veronica
WAIS
Gopher (with all Telnet capabilities disabled)
The following services will be restricted to VERIFIED GREX MEMBERS and
VERIFIED GREX USERS (however the board shall define that term) because of
the potential for world-wide mischief:
Outgoing Usenet News
The following services will be restricted to VERIFIED GREX MEMBERS in good
standing, because these services utilize a lot of bandwidth, offer
less of a benefit to the Grex community as a whole, and/or hold the
potential for system cracking and other undesirable activities:
Outgoing FTP
Outgoing Telnet
Outgoing Lynx
Gopher (with telnet capability enabled.)
IRC
Being that the major objection to open access for the above
services is the lack of available bandwidth on Grex's internet
link, It is understood that any of these services may be made
available to all VERIFIED USERS as well as VERIFIED MEMBERS as soon as Grex
acquires a link of suitable power and robustness.
In order to maintain the integrity of both Grex, and of the Internet as a
whole, the Grex board shall have the power to restrict or deny internet
access to groups or individuals who pose a security risk, or who engage in
inappropriate behavior (as defined by the Grex board).
The board may also make modifications to this proposal without resorting
to a member vote in the case of an emergency situation, or if some
provision of this proposal proves to be technically impossible to implement.
VOTE RESULTS:
Results were posted on Wednesday, August 17, 1994.
49 out of 80 eligible voters cast ballots. The Tally: Yes 36 No 13
The proposal passed.
*********************************************
Wow. Mail is a service that doesn't use much bandwidth? Well, not on a
per-user basis, normally, I guess.
Also, I note that we do allow "outgoing lynx" to all users.
Anyway, I think the alternatives that have some plausible support are:
- status quo: verified members can have one account each.
- verified members can have extra non-voting accounts with net access
upon request, but these accounts are for personal use only, not to
be passed on to other people to use. There is no charge for such
accounts.
The above text raises some other issues that probably ought to be treated in
another item.
I like the status quo.
Right. The terms of verification of an Institutional membership are still not clear. Since that is what this is about, I will suggest some acceptable verifying documents: 1. Proof of incorporation and name/address/phone of resident agent (a copy of the annual report to the state would provide all of this). 2. Check imprinted with name and address of organization, plus names/addresses/phones of officers. 3. Copy of minutes of organization meeting showing resolution to join grex, with names/addresses/phones of board members attached.
dang slipped in.
How about if we simply restrict institutional memberships to organizations which are sufficiently formalized to be able to meet our needs for validation. Any other groups which desire accounts may create, identify and pay for them under the guise of personal memberships for the contact person. Other members of such informal groups could simply create accounts of their own, and the group could ask the paid member to use their own access resources to provide for the group's needs. The individual member would still have a vote (because it is not an institutional membership). This does not seem on close examination to be particularly discriminatory to informal organizations, especially when we created the inst'l m'ship as just a way to recognize unusual needs. Also, I think it is fair to ask that such informal organizations not hamper Grex's need to maintain its own security and internet integrity. What is at issue is what we want to *give* to whom, and as such, it is within our prudent purview to make those choices.
Informal groups may do what you describe without asking and without grex's knowledge, and I presume they have.
I'm also ammused by the statement in the voted on policy that ping doesn't have much potential for abuse. We in fact aren't allowing anybody to run it, because it can be abused so easily.
So then pardon me for asking, since I really have no clue, but isn't that a violation of the result of the vote?
Not really - the policy says those things *should* be made available, not that they will be. Consequently, access to those services are subject freedly to staff choice, unless overruled by the board (or by a vote).
I'm going to enter a new item to pick up the thread of discussion about the 1994 access policy in general. I don't want to lose the thread of discussion about multiple member accounts here.
This thread is now in item 72.
Oops, 75.
Oops. Item 76. I'm sure this time.
re #53 - Thanks for clarifying! :)
I don't see the point of a second access, if you already can get on then what benefit is another access?
Well, clearly it's not for everyone. But as I said, at least 3 people have asked about it in the last year, so clearly some people think it would be important to them. I think their motives range from wanting to give more money to Grex (to which there are no real barriers) to wanting to be able to maintain two separate identities, both with full Internet access.
i think the primary cause at issue is if a person is the contact for an organization which maintains an account, and that person wants a personal account to which the other members of the organization do not have access. the discussion arises out of the potential for abuse of that arrangement, say if a person claims to be the contact for several organizations, and maintains an account for each. the limits to potential abuse are few but substantive. to wit: for full access, even without a vote, each account must be paid for. this is a major deterrent to abuse. we do ask for organizational validation, and even if the organization is unable to provide it, the fact that we ask is somewhat of a deterrant for most folks.
oops s/deterrant/deterrent
I am the contact for four organizations using grex, and I have a personal account. Am I being abused? Use me as an example - what's the issue?
I don't think there is a problem with a person having a personal membership and being the contact person for an institutional account. I think #60 states the motives of the people involved more accurately.
Yeah, I think you're mistaken in #61, Eric. We have taken care of legitimate institutions quite nicely, I think, so that what Rane's doing, for instance, is more than just OK, it's very welcome. I think the people we haven't taken care of are the ones who want to access the net from multiple personal accounts. Whether they are numerous enough to worry about is certainly a legitimate question.
What is the "worry" about users that *want* to have multiple personal accounts? That is, is there a real problem to address?
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I think we should work on whatever we need to do to allow *all* verified users to have Internet access. Then multiple personal accounts becomes a non-issue.
I don't think we will *ever* be to the point where anyone can have internet access for free. If we were to do that, I suspect we'd see our wonderful ISDN fill up so fast it would make our heads spin.
I agree with Dan about the problems it would cause, and I'm also not convinced that it would make sense even if there were some way to make it work. When I first got on Grex several years ago, it was wonderful that Grex was providing Internet e-mail, because that wasn't something that was generally available to people who weren't connected to the University. Now, with much better Net access than Grex could provide available for around $12 per month, Internet access really isn't an important service for Grex to provide. I would much rather see us do a good job of running a conferencing system, than a bad job of trying to so something lots of other companies are doing.
Re #66: Well, the "worry" is just that there are people who would like us to provide something we don't. Maybe we should just tell them they're out of luck, or maybe not. That's what I'd like to see this item resolve. I think at the moment there are 3 options: a) "status quo": Members may have only one personal account with Internet access. b) "free pseudos": Members may tell the treasurer the names of their pseudo accounts, and the treasurer will add them to the internet group. c) "for pay pseudos": Members may pay extra for each pseudo account that they would like to have internet access. I'm leaning toward option b), though it's a little more work for the treasurer to keep track of the pseudos, and it doesn't bring in any extra money for Grex. Option a) would be OK with me too, but option c) seems like selling internet access to me.
I vote for option a) I'd word that differently, however. There are now two kinds of members, individual and institutional, and no definition of a "personal" account. The status quo is that individual and institutional members may each have just one account with internet access.
I agree with Rane.
I think limiting access to members is a good idea. I fail to see any benefit to multiple access and the only drawback i see is tieing up disk space.
Option 3 is essentially selling service. Option 2 is offering members enhanced perks. Option 1 is closest to doing what the vote to restrict access intended to do - limit access to a scarce resource. I think if folks asking about having multiple internet accounts were simply told that Grex is not an internet provider but rather than not offering it at all it is being allowed on a limited basis, for members only, one account per membership. Warn them it's not speedy and ask them to please not abuse the scarce resource by sharing the access with others.
Telling them that would certainly be consistent with what people are told when they try to do other things that are too taxing on resources -- such as running mailing lists from Grex, or building eggdrop.
Why is having second account taxing on Grex resources if it is for personal use only?
Having two accounts under one name isn't using more of our resources. Oh, maybe a little if you take into account the treasurer's time. Mostly, option two would be extending additional perks for membership, something I thought we were going to avoid doing as much as possible. Maybe it's time to again go to the membership and find out how folks feel about this. Maybe the "we" of Grex would like to bundle lots of incentive perks into the membership catagory. That would certainly bring in more money and lots of voting members who would probably be real supportive of the concept of membership perks, and we could be off and running in a whole new direction. ;-)
...in a well worn rut, too...
Guests can have as many pseudo accounts as they want. Why not members? Why is that a "member perk?" I actually only know of one person who wants this, and that person doesn't seem ready to jump off any bridges if they don't get it.
how much additional system resource does a full-access pseudo account use than does a non-member account? it seems like a reasonable approach. there is the fear that it would be abused, say for example if a bunch of people split the cost of one membership and then got pseudos for each one to use as their own...
Members can have as many pseudo accounts as they want, too. Just not with more member "perqs". I just see no good reason for expanding this "perq" for members. I think that one-person, one set of member "perqs" is a good policy. Given how few members we have, it would probably not overload the system, but the principle runs counter to the purposes of Grex (IMO).
Is there some way to set up a member's account and psuedos so that one one of the can use the member perqs at a time? Would that be acceptable if it were?
when I break up this idea into a pie chart I see a huge wedge of it being staff time. Staff time is not something we have lots of. I'd rather see us stay where we are. I might sorta like to have more than one account with outbound access, but I don't see how that contributes to grex in any way whatever. I see how it drains staff time away. I see how it can be abused. I see how it can cost us money, but I don't see enough increased revenue to offset the staff costs. I also see allowing multiple paid accounts as selling access. I would be crushed to see grex go there after being what it is for so long. Yuck.
I'm afraid I don't see any staff time at all. Could you explain what you mean, Charles?
This doesn't sound like a reasonable goal to me, anymore. As someone pointed out up there, the cost of Internet access has come down so much that it's now within reach for most people who consider it a priority. If we can't offer free access to everyone (and there have been some good reasons given why that doesn't seem like a good plan) we shouldn't be going out of our way to try to provide twice as much access to certain people while some get none at all. After all, the people who can afford to donate twice as much to Grex are not the people who can't afford a reasonable ISP. I think Grex's goal has been and should be to get information technology into the hands of people who would otherwise have to do without, and far less so to provide it to those people who would otherwise be inconvenienced by higher costs. Yes, donations are Grex's lifeblood and we oughtn't discourage people from donating as much as they'd like. But we aren't a pay for service ststem, and I don't think very many of us want to see grex head in that direction. If people donate because they think they get something out of it, they're donating for th wrong resosns and we'll eventually, as Mary said, find that we have a membership intent on voting to up Member Perqs to the detriment of our original goals. Want to donate a little extra to Grex? Want to feel like you're "getting something for the money"? Why not pick your favourite non-member grexer and gift him or her with a membership? You'll be adding to the number of members, steering Grex in a direction you like (by influencing the balance of the membrship) and doing a good deed for someone else. Great idea? I think so. And, maybe, when that membership is up, your beneficiary will find that they can afford to renew. If so. that benefits Grex far beyond your 3 or 6 month donation. Want two identities on the net? Use grex for one and get an ISP for the other. Many ISP's will even let you use more than one mailbox (intended for family members, but also useful for nicknames for non-business use.) Yes, some people will be left behind this way and that's unfortunate. But we can't be all things to all people. We have to decide whether we want to be a conferencing community that also provides an alternate to an ISP for some people or whether we want to be an ISP that sponsors a conferencing system.
I see staff having to do all kinds of legwork when one of these accounts is 'loaned' to a friend who does something unpopular on the net. Who do we go after? How do we resolve the stink? I see time spent keeping track of which accounts are linked. I see time spent working on policy before and after any kind of 'event' linked to this idea. OTOH I see maybe $60 a year average in the long run. My main complaint is that we would be selling access for a fee if we adopted this policy. This would be bad IMO. Public TV has little returns for donations, but if you send them $1000, you don't get 400 mugs from them.
There are at least three options for what to do (I outlined them in #71), so I when you say "this policy", Charles, it's unclear what you mean. One of the options would give people access from multiple accounts without selling it. And keeping track of the linked accounts won't require any staff time, because the treasurer can do it (and it's really pretty simple). I don't understand what you mean about spending time on policy associated with an "event". And as to accounts being abused, we have to worry about that now, too.
If we don't sell them, and it doesn't create headaches, that's one thing. Selling them is quite another. I'm still worried about outbound access for people we can't effectively validate. When I say 'event' I mean something like sending 4 gigs of email somewhere, and the staff at that location comes to us. We have to determine who did it. If they did it by accident, or maliciously, etc. That could be hard to do if we don't know who it was. Right now we don't have to worry about abuse of other systems too much. The ones who have outbound access are known. The ones who don't are limited in what they can do out there.
Mail abuse isn't the best example to support your case, since all users have access to outbound mail whether they're validated or not. I don't see significant support for selling additional net access for a fee.
I have to say that I entered this item with no strong position on the issue at hand. I would even add that I had a slight inclination to support allowing multiple "member accounts", if there was a need, and no net cost to Grex, in staff time, resources, etc. I have come to the conclusion that it would not be Grex-ly to have multiple paid memberships for any given member. People, not accounts, have member- ships. If they want to extend the perqs to more than one of their own accounts, I'm not sure I see the harm, as long as they take *full* responsibility for any qsuedos, as they do for their primary account.
Right, I was busy with other things when I wrote that. Here's a better example. Stopping all AOL users in a region from using their web browsers by telnetting to the DNS port on the AOL machine and sending a stream of control characters to kill named. If someone were stupid enough to do that from here, currently we would be able to help trace that event. With the enabled pseudos we can't necessarily do that. That worries me. I don't want Grex to become 'that system' on the 'net that allows crackers to do what they will. Certainly this is an extreme example, but I would rather fasten down the edge of the tent just a bit.
Well... Sure we would, since we'd still have the name of a real person associated with each account in the internet group. Yes, members could allow other people to use their accounts, but we have that problem now. I don't understand your objection, Charles, because I don't think crackers are going to be willing to send us ID.
There is a response in Agora's "spam email" item that points out why it would be good for members on Grex to be able to use two logins [Item 87] #19 of 19: by Mike McNally (mcnally) on Sun, Feb 8, 1998 (19:46): However it is far more common to wind up on a spam delivery list because you visited a web page, belong to a mailing list, or posted something to a Usenet newsgroup. I have two main accounts, one of which is the one from which I post to Usenet and which belongs to non-local mailing lists. That one gets about 40-50 times as much spam as the e-mail address I give to family, friends, and professional colleagues (which receives virtually none..). If someone on Grex wanted to use this strategy, they would not be allowed to have telnet access for both accounts.
That response does not indicate a need for two accounts with telnet access.
Right. You don't *need* to be a member to join mailing lists or to visit web sites. At least in principle, you can't post to usenet even with a membership, at present. Obviously there are ways around that, but as at least some of them are just mail gateways, you don't need membership for *that*.
You have several choices: