Grex Oldcoop Conference

Item 50: Commands to view Grex statement of principles and terms of service

Entered by remmers on Tue Dec 9 11:50:53 2003:

In response to concerns about usage policy statements not being
easy to find outside of newuser, I wrote a couple of commands to
extract and display relevant newuser text.  If you have a tty
connection (dialup/telnet/ssh), you can try them out by
typing !grex-principles or !grex-limits at the next prompt.
Web versions are http://cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/grex-principles
and http://cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/grex-limits .

These read from the actual newuser info file and so will always
be in sync with whatever newuser says, now or in the future.

The command names are probably too verbose.  Maybe "prin" (for
Principles) and "tos" (for Terms of Service) are better.  I'd
like to put a couple of permanent lines in the motd pointing to
them, something like this:

  http://cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/prin    -Grex Statement of Principles
  http://cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/tos     -Grex Terms of Service
15 responses total.
#1 of 15 by mynxcat on Tue Dec 9 13:00:43 2003:

Thanks remmers! Can we have a message on teh motd for some time telling people
who log on about these new commands?

#2 of 15 by remmers on Tue Dec 9 13:28:41 2003:

As I indicated in #0, I'd like it to be a short but *permanent* motd
message, so that people always have an easy way to find out what the
policies are.  Want to wait though until we settle on names for the
commands.  I'm open to suggestions.

#3 of 15 by remmers on Tue Dec 9 13:39:36 2003:

Changed my mind and put the URLs in the motd with the current names.
If the command names change, I'll change the motd correspondingly.

#4 of 15 by other on Tue Dec 9 14:04:27 2003:

Good call.

I'd like to see the limits page be a lot more terse.  I think 
brevity will go a long way toward increasing the number of people 
who read, understand and pay attention to those limits.

A simple please at the beginning and thanks at the end will retain 
the polite character of the statement, without adding much in 
length.

#5 of 15 by remmers on Tue Dec 9 15:30:41 2003:

I agree.

#6 of 15 by mynxcat on Tue Dec 9 16:30:04 2003:

Re 2> Serves me right for being half asleep while reading this. Thanks 
for taking care of this, remmers.

#7 of 15 by dpc on Thu Dec 11 19:08:14 2003:

Good show, John.  Thanks!

#8 of 15 by aruba on Thu Dec 11 19:18:32 2003:

Looks like I forgot to respond to this message earlier.  Thanks John!

#9 of 15 by bhoward on Thu Dec 11 23:15:46 2003:

I like the commands but the name is a bit long.  How
about adding "limits" and "principles" as aliases?

#10 of 15 by gelinas on Mon Jan 26 18:46:50 2004:

It looks like the statements mentioned above have been removed from the
message of the day; I've now put them back.

#11 of 15 by other on Mon Jan 26 20:17:40 2004:

The formatting needs correction for backtalk.

#12 of 15 by jor on Mon May 3 11:43:30 2004:

        I wonder why 'preformeated' text is being used,
        with <pre> and </pre>. That's what causes it not
        to wrap.

#13 of 15 by remmers on Tue May 4 12:10:09 2004:

The documents are extracted in real time from the newuser text.
This is plain text, not html.  I use <pre> so that they display
the same way on the web that they do with a telnet connection.
Without any tagging at all, they'd display on the web as a
totally unformatted mess.  I could try rewriting the CGI
script to intelligently insert <p> tags and such, but that
seems like more trouble than it's worth and could be susceptible
to breaking if the newuser text ever changes.

#14 of 15 by jor on Tue May 4 12:41:12 2004:

        err, preformatted.

        Now I get it, that's why they are in
        /cgi-bin

#15 of 15 by jesuit on Wed May 17 02:14:28 2006:

TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE

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