We seem to have discussed this to death in other items of this cf, so I'm starting a new item here. A little background. I have been arguing that a lot of users do not have a sense of belonging here. Maybe a misperception on my part, but I'm not the only one who feels that way. I have mentioned conversations I've had with a couple of users, and Jamie has posted an email from a user who would like to get more involved, but isn't sure how, and besides, does feel a bit unconnected to the rest of the community. I'd like to use this item to brainstorm. How do we get people more involved in grex as a community. While there are the lunches in AA, I'd like the focus of this item to be people who are not in AA.39 responses total.
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I disagree. It has worked for grex: we get lots of new users. What we don't get is members. I don't think focusing on off-line actions will help. The community is online.
Here are a few suggestions I have a. Welcome message in a newuser's Inbox. Given the whole issue we've had with the spamming this last week, this may need some discussion on the technical cons of this idea. Would populating the new user's mailbox with one message be called spamming? Would it put a load on the system? b. "Advertising" bbs and party and any other community related features of grex. I'm thinking motd, but are there any better ideas out there c. Survey on how grex could be improved. I liked Jamie's idea with this one. However, his modus operandi didn't quite fly. Is there a way to still conduct this survey? Maybe a message in motd to go to BBS and post in an item? Or email someone with their response?
Re 2> We get a lot of new users, true. What we don't get is more people into the community. That's what I want to focus on with this item. Once you get people interested in the community, the paying members will follow
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Thanks for entering this item, Sapna. I think we could do a survey of nonmembers (or anyone) if we discussed it here and reached a consensus on how to do it, when to do it, what questions to ask, and how to report the results. I think it's a good idea. Some questions: do you feel connected to the Grex community? (Well, something like that; it might sound too weird to people that way) Do you participate in BBS? Do you participate in Party? What things do you like about Grex, and what don't you like? What brought you to Grex? What made you stay?
Good questions, Mark. Besides the survey, we should also discuss making features of grex like bbs and party more visible to the average new user, or even those that come on just for email and the shell prompt. Also, I saw a response in agora where a user wanted to know if grex would host a game he'd written. I know we do house a few games. Is this an option. I can understand if this could be more of a headache than anything else to staff, but this might be worth looking into - letting budding unix programmers program no-risk games. I realise this nees to be discussed in-depth before it is adopted (or maybe the answer is a simple no?)
Putting a message into a new mailbox as it is created is trivial and not spam; the file has to be created any way. I *thought* we were already doing such, but it is not in my mailbox now. I _could_ create a new account, but I'm kinda busy on other things. :(
I just created a new account. No mail (Please delete tstacct1. Thanks)
I'm in favor of creating new user mailboxes with a message included which does two basic things: Serves as a reminder of the terms of use, and explains briefly what Grex is about and how to participate. How the message is crafted will go a long way toward determining the effect it has, assume anyone actually to read it. If a poll is to be conducted, I would not want to see it implemented any other way than in bbs, though responses could be sent by email if the user wishes to remain private about their answers. The intitial message referred to above could link or point to the poll/ survey, but spamming people with surveys is still spamming them. Sapna, one thing you've mentioned a bit is the MOTD, and this is a sore point for a lot of people. I don't know why it is such a big deal, but a lot of people get annoyed when the MOTD gets large, and a lot of people don't ever even see it. People get practiced at ignoring it, even if it doesn't scroll past them and out of view faster than thay can read it. The upshot is, I don't have anything against using the MOTD, but I don't think it is nearly as effective a communication tool as you seem to think it would be. I could be wrong, though. Despite the way jp2 went about it, the notion of somehow selectively contacting non-member users who login within a certain time period just to find out what keeps them from joining up is intriguing to me. It presents sort of a slice of life, or a statistical sample which can be valuable for several things, as the result jp2 claims appear to suggest. When the new machine is up, perhaps implementing an automated system which sends an email crafted by a Grex outreach person or team to non-member users logging in on a specific day or week, a few times a year, might be a n interesting idea.
The other day, I had a piece of linen way up in some nasal tube or whatever, but I thought it was a SPIDEr till I got it out. Yesterday, there was a spider running above my head. I killed it.
Eric - just when I blast out against you, you go and redeem yourself ;) The MOTD approach - I know people get annoyed by it. But I would like to argue as to its effectiveness. The grexergallery has seen the most new picture uploads for the time the message was on the motd. So there are people who do read it, even if it does annoy them. I think this route is worth discussing. As for your idea about sending email to random users - I was thinknig along the same lines last night. However, I do want to see this go out to members also - especially those that are not members on a regular basis. Don't want them to think that now that we have their money , we don't care :)
Re resp:10: My annoyance with long MOTDs is that I start to miss new stuff buried in the pile of old messages. My solution was to create a .hushlogin file in my home directory to suppress the automatic MOTD display, then add this to my .profile, so I only see the new stuff: # Show differences in motd, instead of whole thing. motd >.newmotd diff .oldmotd .newmotd | grep '>' cp .newmotd .oldmotd Obviously if you do this, you should either 'touch .oldmotd' before the first time it's run, or expect an error message. .hushlogin also suppresses the new mail message on login, but I run 'frm' in my .profile anyway.
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Re #10: The problem with doing a survey through bbs is that most users never see the bbs. So in order to get a reasonable sample you'd have to contact people some other way.
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While we're on this discussion, I've heard two different reasons for finding Jamie's approach to the survey offensive 1. The more important one - It provided too great a load on the system which rendered it unuseable. I understand this, and I think we can overcome this issue by sending out the survey in a controlled manner, maybe 10 a day, or less, or more, depending on system capacity 2. And a subtle indication was provided for the following - Sending a user a survey is as good as spamming the user. I personally disagree, especially since this survey has to do with the system, and is related to making the system better. If Jamie's data is to be believed, his email was received well, and in some cases appreciated, and welcomed. I think this is something worth discussing further before we abandon the approach.
I don't know. At very least you should provide some kind of opt-out feature for people who don't want to receive surveys in the future.
I agree with that.
Re #16: Yes, like via email. I think that's probably the best way. But we should work out the details here ahead of time, and get the staff onboard with the project, before doing anything. I'm no expert, but I know that some surveys turn out to be useful and some don't. So I think we should give some thought to what questions to ask, and what reports we'll run on the data when we get them back.
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No-one responds to spam, jp2. That way they'll KNOW the e-mail address's active.
And I was getting to what Jamie says. The email that the users get should be as personal as possible. I think the initial contact with the user would be a carefully worded email explaining the reason behind the survey, telling them that we value their presence, and asking if they'd be interested in a survey to help the system. Unless they're really busy, I think we'll get favorable responses. (It may also help if we explain our mission and ask them if they think that we are following the right path to fulfill that mission. Of course this might be more complex than it sounds, being that defining a mission, and then reaching a consensus on what the mission really means could lead to months of discussion)
There are two issues here, and they demand different approaches. For an introduction to Grex and its services, a message delivered when the mailbox is created is great. If the goal is to collect data with a survey, however, I think the answers we get would actually be more useful if we *didn't* deliver the message right away, but rather waited a few weeks. Someone who has just connected for the first time won't have had time to form any opinions.
Oh, these were two entirely different emails we were talking about. Sorry if that wasn't made clear.
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Nice, tod. But we weren't conducting a survey :) Just throwing around ideas on what a servey would contain
Right - feel free to critique the questions and add new ones.
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In fact I bet that would be an (almost) trivial modification of the "vote" program...
You could always put a copy of the survey via the web interface, for people who don't actually mind filling out in that manner.
As a formerly local very active Grexer, and then a non-local less active Grexer, I think I'll disagree about offline stuff being unimportant, and the community being online. I think there were three things I used to get out of Grex. The technology was neat, the discussions were neat, and a significant part of my off-Grex social life was arranged through Grex. I suppose I could think of it as having been my social club, or something of the sort. As a non-local Grexer with several more years of experience, the technology no longer seems all that interesting, I've seen all the discussions before, and there aren't many local Grexers to interact with without getting on a plane. There's no way Grex is going to be the significant force in my life that it once was, so I just pop in to see what's going on with old friends. This is fine with me -- I moved on because I wanted to and am having fun in new and interesting ways -- but I think anybody not from Ann Arbor who wants to get out of Grex what I used to is going to be disappointed.
oh come the fuck on and stop scribbling shit.
Yeps, come and come and come until you can't come no more.
seps
i give up.
allo, styles
hullo, parcel & styles
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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