response 25 of 109:

Jul 22 09:11 UTC 2008

I generally am not very relevant in this discussion but I'm posting this
anyway.

CMSs are "certainly" not the way for Grex to go. Their functions only slightly
overlap with those of Grex's and despite what remmers says they are far from
being "easy to maintain." They are almost invitations for disaster because
they're too complex, often involve many "moving parts," and mostly hinge on
"shiny new technology" instead of "proven old ways."

A simple CMS package will need heavy server-side (e.g. PHP, Perl) and
client-side scripting, some sort of database (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL), and
"mods" for the web server (e.g. mod_php for Apache). These are obvious
performance drains and security threats. Grex is known (and loved for) being
simple and "old-skool." Some Grex users delibrately use very minimal setups and
view these same pages through lynx (or through bbs), with those "frills"
they'll be deterred. I like it when pagefuls of good talk is loaded over my
dial-up connection in under 15 seconds.

On the functional aspect, Grex offers a bundle: shell access, email,
webhosting, "and" community interaction. CMSs are focused only on collaborative
content creation which is not the sort of community interaction Grexers are
involved in. Grex isn't hosting some sort of "project" that needs
"collaboration," i.e. modification of the "same" content. Its community
interaction paradigm is very well described by the title it already has: bbs.
The refurbishment it needs in that respect is probably some new "light"
bulletin board software but I'd be skeptic to even deploy phpBB and the like
because all of them, like CMSs, depend on server-side scripting and DBMSs.

As for "standards compliance," as far as I know most "recent versions" of
standards have been specifically designed to be supersets of their previous
versions. So Grex is not non-standard if it still presents content in old HTML
instead of some blasted XHTML/DTHML 4.1-bloody-transitional. In fact, one has
to be proud to present a functional Grex using the smallest possible subset of
the pertinent standards. That's good minimalism.

I believe on a "frills-mostly-with-a-bit-of-content" Internet a good ol'
system's mission should be to keep up the good ol' ways. In case of Grex, that
could be accomplished by enriching the shell/remote access experience (for me
that boils down to port forwarding and running httptunnel ;-), expanding (or
total abandoning) of email services (to include IMAP, for example), relaxing
webhosting practice so that people can make diverse websites within reason (I
don't think people should be able to put up sites written in PHP on Grex,
though), and a more capable but still "text-oriented" bbs (a "multi-level
forum" structure instead of conferences, and a proper linkable archive).

Good luck to [put the hero's name here] who will revive Grex. Seriously though,
I'll be happy to help if there's something I can do for Grex over some
thousands of kilometers and a dial-up connection.