The discussion cmccabe started deserves its own Backtalk item. http://www.grex.org/~cmccabe/grex2.0.html I think most active Grex members share cmccabe's feelings. What we have here on Grex is never going to be of interest to more than a small niche of users, but there is a significant potential community hidden within the millions of Internetters. We can keep the fire going, make some improvements, and who know what will happen? Personally, I think brushing up Backtalk to get rid of the web interface crashes and Fronttalk to fix the next unread post marking subsystem will make the conference system a lot easier to use for both new and old users. There has been disscussion of this in the Garage conference.10 responses total.
I've skimmed this; I'll give it a proper reading later. Yes, these are good ideas: I say go for it. A former Grex board member once told me to take Grex, and make it what I thought it should be. I've never had the time, but given that this place is basically an empty shell, I think that's a great idea. Take it, make it what you want it to be. If it makes sense, I'll support you!
Follow your dreams. Hitch your wagons to a star. Wash up when you're done.
Thanks papa. And sorry I didn't see this post until now. It seems like the next steps are to establish what the next steps are. Not knowing exactly how to do that in a way that engages as many Grex users as possible, I've simply been trudging ahead with trying to put some ideas in linear order. I've been doing that both by continuing to revise the file you linked above, papa, and by writing a longer, more general document on what I think is the general niche and opportunity for any nameless system like grex. I'll post the second here as soon as it has enough coherence so as to not appear like the writings of a lunatic (appearances are important, you know). I think it would be great to organize collective input into a revision of that grex2.0 file as a way of planning the next steps. Do you have any ideas about ways to do this? Set up a wiki? Use git? etc. On the topic of the "significant potential community hidden within the millions of Internetters", it is a good question of what the possibilities are. As I've been working on the more general document mentioned above, I've been doing some "ethnographic" research on other public access unix systems and similar shell-based communities; and I've been both surprised and excited by how many scattered people out there have the same ideas and are really enthusiastic about them. So I'm not sure about absolute numbers, but there is certainly a dispersed crowd of passionate people who are looking for something like this.
An idea: put your thoughts in a file, format it using Markdown. Push that to github, and invite comments. Or use something like Google Docs.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: post links here, along with notices about when it's updated. :-)
Will do. Working on it right now.
I put the text up in markdown format here: https://bitbucket.org/cmccabeMD/grex2.0/src/c6c30d019fae291478740a3437e4c1 7a13 c139c2/brainstorm.md It took me a while to put this up because I am working on a larger "manifesto" to go along with this, and that has been a rabbit hole. But it is coming along nicely now.
fronttalk broke that link, so you'll just have to manually append the second line to the first.
resp:8 I imagine that was actually the text entry program, 'gate', which is the default.
Indeed, it would be nice to see a productive way forward for Grex. I try and get (non-destructive) members of the hacker community to sign up for a shell account. I don't know how many do. I've done several small projects that involved giving people free accounts on various kinds of systems, most of it is vintage computer related, or accounts on obscure OSes that people wanted to play with (e.g. VMS, ULTRIX, etc). I've helped a few people set up oldschool BBSes (dialin as well as telnet). People would initially sign up, goof around for a while, and then stop using the system. I'm not sure how to keep people engaged. We've talked about extending one of my small forums projects (hbb, Hacker BBS) to include CLI/dialin BBS functionality, with the idea that maybe people would continue using it if they had the *option* of using a web forum frontend, but also interacting with the other interfaces at will. IIRC, that's what we sort of already have here (I don't know, I use the CLI `bbs` interface). Part of the attraction of Grex, to me, when starting out, was having a UNIX-like system that someone else managed. I'm not sure I'm representative of the typical potential Grex user, though. (I do still read the BBS, I'm just mostly in lurk mode nowadays!)
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