ryan Mon Aug 29 22:49:55 2005 Ryan Antkowiak,,, ryan Mon Aug 29 22:49:55 20 ryan Mon Aug 29 22:49:55 2005 Ryan Antkowiak,,, ryan Mon Aug 29 22:49:55 20 ryan Mon Aug 29 22:49:55 2005 Ryan Antkowiak,,, ryan Mon Aug 29 22:49:55 20 ryan Mon Aug 29 22:49:55 2005 R73 responses total.
No.
No.
you don't need a separate cf if you just freeze your items and enter stuff you want to say. I'm not sure a blog cf is the answer. When you enter a blog, it needs to be in the cf it's most relevant to. I don't see blogs really flying, otherwise
Yes. I'd not be entering text there though.
Great Idea! I think it would be just fine.
yes, i woul support the idea
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I wouldn't have any problem with it as long as it was constrained to one conference. However, I think it's unnecessary. You can freeze an item and get the same effect. Or you can use LiveJournal, which is a far better tool for running a blog. Running a one-person-only blog item on Grex is a bit like pounding a nail with a screwdriver.
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Hmm. Interesting. Want to think about it a little more but I think this could be an interesting experiment and the rules for that conference could be made clear to participants in the conference login message. I need to reread the charter/amendments/policy decisions tonight though to see whether we would need to make any formal change to the grex bylaws to do this.
Yay, livejournal.
You don't post much in livejournal :(
Sure, a blog conference is a good idea.
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Re#7: Promise? :-)
I'm against it philosophically.
I think it's a good idea. If you need another fairwitness, I'd be happy to help. I don't know that I'd enter an item, but I'd certainly be inclined to respond to items others entered.
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resp:8 I agree-- LiveJournal is mighty handy. If a blog cf was created, there's nothing that doesn't say people couldn't link a blog site to the cf and maybe post selections once in a while. I don't know if this isn't superfluous, however. I really think Grex can't be handled like a typical blog and a conference can't be run like one. I could see a conference being created discussing the ethical implications of running a blog maybe... like, what things should you avoid posting about work so you don't get fired (say if your boss happens to read it)? There might be debate on how much information is too much... yadda yadda... and then people might link their various blog sites. *shrug* I think that might be a little more interesting and might suit Grex a little better. Your mileage may vary, depending on maintenance schedule.
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I think it is a good idea. I probably would even try to use it. There are a lot of limitations with grex's software as gull points out. It is a lot easier to keep a blog on a site with blogging software for reasons other than just control over the item.
I was thinking about proposing a conference called "moderated" in which it was made clear through initial posting and periodic reminders that the conference had a moderator, not a fairwitness, and that the moderator would and could use their powers to delete items. The conventions of the conf would be that the user id that starts an item could email the fw from that id and ask for an item to be removed. No new staff burden, just a way for us to try out the policy for a while to see if it made much difference. I'd be glad to "moderate" that conf.
re 12 I don't have much time!
I'd want a "moderated" conference to be on a separate filesystem, which would prevent the possibility of linked items. I don't read or write blogs, and am not sure how they'd work within Picospan or Backtalk. It sounds like an interesting possibility.
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YAY!
AYAYAYAYAY!!!
The blog conference, in my opinion, would only work if each user had the capabilities of a f-w within his own item. The easiest way to do that within Picospan would be to make a separate blog conference for each user. Now, *that*, in my opinion, has potential. Create a separate conference for any user who wants one. On NextGrex, there will be enough disk space to allow this. I would want the blog conference to be on a separate filesystem from other conferences. Currently, a fairwitness can link an item into his conference, then censor or scribble responses from that item. I wouldn't want to give any and all users the ability to do that to items in the public conferences, just on request. Maybe there's a way in Picospan and/or Backtalk to eliminate the link command from the powers given to a f-w. Have the blog conferences owned by an alternative "cfadm" user, call it "blogadm", who doesn't have access to the link command, for example. Then bloggers couldn't mess with each other's blogs.
Common legal wisdom on online forums is that the forum and its staff can only dodge liability for libel issues when they don't exercise editorial control or moderation of the content. Is this still seen as the case?
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If you really want a blog conference, you'd need a method whereby individual authors of items could moderate and censor comments to his/her blog. By this, I don't mean change someone's words, but be able to delete comments they're not comfortable with, or disallow certain users to post. Without this you're just going to have a whole bunck of nuked items becomes someone went aheand a posted nasrty comments on people's blogs.
I would like to see the blog conference incorporate all of your wishes, if the software allows. It would be an interesting experiment. But my support goes *poof* if all of this censorship power isn't clearly displayed as a warning on the conference login page.
Actually, I'm going to ammend that last comment slightly. You state you'd like the FW to be able to choose who has access to the conference. That's not something I'd support Grex doing even on an experimental basis. I guess we all have our limits. ;-)
It seems none of you guys have ever heard of the rc file.
Re 33> If that was a response to my post, I meant that the author should have control over who could respond to their individual blog in the conference. (If we decie to have individual conferences for individual blogs, yes, then the FW) I know it's not Grex policy to do that, and I don't want to see that happen either. But without such a provision, we're going to have pretty unhappy bloggers. Which is why I don't think the conference is such a good idea. But I'm willing to see it as an experiment. But then I wouldn't participate in it, except to read it.
Re #29: No. One of the surviving parts of the CDA changed that.
I believe my suggestion of making a separate filesystem for the blog conferences, and having separate conferences for each blog, is workable on Grex using Picospan. There are no obvious technical obstacles to it. A conference on Grex is a subdirectory of /bbs, and also a line in /bbs/conflist. For example: ag_ora:%agora48 The line in /bbs/conflist can point to directories which are not subdirectories of /bbs. I don't recall the exact syntax, but I imagine it would look like this: jep:/blog/jep The biggest obstacles are not the space or separate directory required for the conference itself, it would be the participation files. A different participation file is needed for each conference you read. If blogs, using my proposed format, become common, then some users might have thousands of participation files for them, with each consuming 1 block of disk space and 1 inode. I speculate a block on the home filesystem for NextGrex will be 1K, so 1000 participation files would occupy 1 MB. There's nothing preposterous so far. Disk space is really, really cheap these days. If blogs using this system become really popular, it might be well to automate the creation of the blog conference directory and entry in /bbs/conflist. Now for the advantages. The powers suggested for the blog conference are the same powers a fw already has. A fw of his own blog conference can make use of the rc, login, logout, index and bulletin files to customize his conference. He can remove -- but not edit -- responses or items. It would be possible, if the cfadm set it up that way, to have lists to permit or restrict individual loginids access, or write access, to the conference. As I said previously, I am not familiar with blogs, but it seems to me this ought to add up to a pretty reasonable capability for producing a blog.
Just as a technical matter, for that to work you'd need a separate FS for each blog conference. Otherwise, anyone could link someone else's blog into his conference & refuse to delete it. I don't think it'll work, John.
Is there no way to disable the link capability for the fairwitness of a conference?
If I were to guess, I'd say that linking is just another way of saying "creating a symlink" and as far as I know, there is no way to prevent anyone with write access to a directory from creating a symlink to any other file on the filesystem to which that user has read access. Am I wrong on this?
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Ok, correction noted, but in what way does that alter my conclusion (that there's really no way to prevent item linking by anyone with fw access to the conference directory without significantly rewriting picospan to redefine the functions of or create a whole new class of fw)?
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or #0, since #1 is rather short on verbage of any useful sort.
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Yeah but what's that in binary, huh? :p
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You've been reading too much Doug Adams.
You folks are setting yourself up for disappointment here. If you enter text in a blog conference, with all kinds of special rules about how you'll be in control of your own text, etc., etc., you be begging folks to save copies of your items just because they can. Doubt it? Check out M-net about a day after you start feeling comfortable with your new control. Grex is public. You shouldn't enter anything here you don't want public. If you do, the system is gracious enough to allow you to remove your words. But we can't go any further and it's unrealistic to expect we can make your mistakes go away.
doesn't mean Grex shouldn't try. As a nurse who has performed thousands of abortions, you should know pretty well the reasons why it's heartless to not help people clean up their mistakes.
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51: <chuckle> Yup. Sure did.
Mary's got a good point about control of text. On Grex or on any other system, there is no way for information to be both public and controlled. I don't think that means a blog conference or system can't be part of Grex. I think people just need to be aware that that's the way it is.
re 48 He makes for good reads. re 50 YEAH< BEING MARY< SHE SHOULD"VE MARRIED THE PEOPLE < RATHER THAN ABORT THEM< AGHAHAHA
re50: /shoots fresca out of nose!
Ya know, this is a golden opportunity for us Grexers to FORCE righteous M-Netters to archive ludicrous amounts of essentially useless text.
OOOh, what a Great Idea!
M-Net's got plenty of disk space.
and it is FASTER.
ya know ya make me hot when ya talk dirty like that.
I don't want to make you hot. I've seen what you post about in the sex.cf.
YEA, he'll come to m-net, where it's HOT and FAST. BOO YEA
A linked item is a hard link, but the item directories are owned by "cfadm". No fairwitness could link an item by executing "ln" themselves. If backtalk and picospan were modified not to prevent fw's in those conferences from executing the "link" command, it would prevent linked items.
It would take a modification to picospan and backtalk? Somehow I don't see those two changes as being very likely.
resp:61 pretty much in context with the rest of the horrors there ;) don't read it if you can't handle it
Very good! Glad to see you get it.
I'd be perfectly willing to make such a change to Backtalk. Having more per-conference configurability of user and fw powers is something I want to do anyway. I even have some notes on how to do this. I suspect the chances of changes to Picospan are slimmer.
I was envisioning a way to remove the Unix link command itself. But then, I was envisioning a way to use a separate Unix loginid to own the blog files. I guess that part would be difficult if we didn't also use a separate set of Picospan and Backtalk binaries, huh? Oh, well. My idea is more involved than I had expected. It is hereby junked at this time, but if the capabilities come together at some point in the future, I think it could be worth revisiting. In general, I support the blog conference. I think it will be a very resource-intensive fw position for someone if it becomes popular, but it's worth a try. Grex has tried very few new ideas in the past, and could benefit from some innovation. I don't think we should be quick to shoot down something new. This blog conference proposal is new, different, and outside the normal historical scope of Grex's functions. Those are positives.
resp:66 why thankee.
Yer welcome!@
You're welcome!
yeah, yeah, break out the Moosehead beer already. You two are overdue for that six-pack roulette match, eh? ;)
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