Yet another discussion about the dead conferences

Jan 18 21:16 UTC 2000

Here's a list of the conferences that haven't seen any activity at all, not
even "gee, this conference is dead" responses:

 Mar 12  1999 aaypsi
 Feb  9  1999 accordions
 Jul  5  1998 ascii
 Nov  7  1997 backtalk2
 Nov  7  1997 commnets
 Feb 11  1998 disabilities
 Mar  3  1999 diversity
 Mar 14  1999 environ
 Mar 12  1999 finance
 Nov  7  1997 grexnews
 Mar 12  1999 history
 Jul 17  1998 inferno
 Nov  7  1997 info2
 Dec 23  1998 melvin
 Nov  7  1997 monthly
 Nov  7  1997 newsletter
 Feb  3  1999 oathbound
 Nov  7  1997 only1
 Mar 18  1996 orig
 Nov  7  1997 planning
 Nov  7  1997 pseudo
 Nov  7  1997 publicity
 Nov 29  1997 recovery
 Nov 23  1994 roadmap
 Nov  7  1997 roleplaying
 Jan 30  1999 root
 Dec 15  1997 rp4
 Nov  7  1997 safety
 Feb 23  1994 share
 Mar 12  1999 smallbusiness
 Nov  7  1997 storage
 Nov  7  1997 sympathy
 Jan 12  1999 tv
 Jul  7  1998 utne
 Nov  7  1997 win1
 Nov  7  1997 world2
 Nov  7  1997 xgen
 Mar 12  1999 zen

The date next to the cf name indicates the last time any new responses or
items were entered. I didn't include old restarted conferences for obvious
reasons.

I know there have been many debates about whether or not to reap these
conferences, so I won't try to advocate that sort of a discussion. What we
need is a forum to discuss how to revitalize these conferences. Should we try
to decentralize the discussions in agora? Should we place new FW's into these
conferences? Should we just leave them as a sort of grex graveyard?

If I remember right, mnut has a policy of reviewing its conferences
semianually to check for deadness. Should we apply something like this?

If the problem does turn out to be a lack of FW's to stimulate discussion,
I'll volunteer to host some of these conferences. But we do need to start
talking about this.

response 2 of 66:

Jan 18 22:24 UTC 2000

You're one of those non-pack rat people, right?

response 4 of 66:

Jan 18 23:26 UTC 2000

Small business is not dead.  There is an occasional interesting discussion.
Diversity was stillborn and can be reaped.

response 6 of 66:

Jan 18 23:53 UTC 2000

I think the list in #0 may reflect last item date, but not last response
date.  This, from a quick glance at Oathbound.

response 8 of 66:

Jan 19 00:18 UTC 2000

I'm with cmcgee here, Don.  Why do these conferences bother you so much?

They harm nothing, and many of them are on people cflists, so new people
wndering in are as likely to start a conversation as not.

response 10 of 66:

Jan 19 06:06 UTC 2000

Don's numbers are definately wrong.  Ken's explanation sound right.

I agree that deadwood is a problem.  Interested newusers get in, and
start reading, and then notice that everything is five years old. After
going through screen after screen of ancient history, they decide Grex
is some old abandoned system that used to have some activity, but has
since died out.  They are disappointed that they missed Grex in it's
heyday, but they leave, never posting anything.

Note that this can happen in perfectly active conferences too.  You have
to read 150 items in coop before you see this item.

The default "read new" behavior of showing you only the first and last
items helps in the case of conferences that still have some activity.
Backtalk allows fairwitnesses to set more elaborate versions of this
rule.  For example, in the "garage" conference, when you first join the
conference the first and last items will be new, but so will any other
items which have had responses in the last week.  So on first reading,
you'll mostly see items that have some active discussion going in them.
But Picospan doesn't do this and most fairwitnesses don't set this.

With totally dead conferences this doesn't help.  I'd like to see a
program that runs once a week and identifies conferences that haven't
had a response for a month.  It would automatically insert a message
into the conference's "login" screen saying something like "This
conferences hasn't had any activity in 7 weeks.  You can read old
postings here, and if you make new postings other people are likely to
show up in the next few days and respond.  For a list of more active
conferences, type !whatshot".  The "whatshot" list would also be
generated by the weekly program, and would give the top twenty
conferences sorted by activity.  Such messages would go away if anything
more than one or two messages were posted.  Writing this program well
would require some careful thought.

response 12 of 66:

Jan 19 21:09 UTC 2000

Part of the "problem is publicity.  I had no idea over ten of
the conferences existed, and still don't know what they are.
 
As for conferences with mostly old stuff, I'd like to see some-
thing like this: 

1. Create an archive for Coop.
2. Nothing goes directly into Coop-Archive.
3. Everything that goes in Coop also goes in Coop-Archive.
4. Any item in Coop which hasn't had a response in say four
   months is retired, or deleted, or whatever Picospan calls it.
5. Everything in Coop-Archive is frozen.
6. Nothing is ever deleted from Coop-Archive.
7. Fairwitness applies judgment to all of the above.

response 14 of 66:

Jan 19 23:10 UTC 2000

Two don't, actually - roadmap and share.  

The problem with the scheme in #12 would be that often old conversations get
ressurrected after years of inactivity, and are just as interesting the second
time around.  I'm not sure whether the advantage of keeping the dead items
out of the way would outweight the disadvantage of not having them randomly
prodded and reactivated.

I noticed recently that at least the pistachio version of backtalk has a "read
backwards" option, which seemed like a good idea to me, because it shows you
the recent and (presumably) active items first.  There isn't any way this
could be done in picospan too, is there?

response 16 of 66:

Jan 20 03:34 UTC 2000

i saw some y2k remediation software today that went through logfiles generated
by non-compliant software and altered the dates to reflect the correct ones.

what better way to give our conferences the appearance of freshness and
constant use?

(just kidding, folks.  really!)  ;)

response 18 of 66:

Jan 20 18:35 UTC 2000

Dead, inactive conferences could be placed in a separate location in the 
list shown by "help conferences" and the Backtalk equivalent, to make it 
clear they're archives or old/inactive.  Or perhaps a marker could be 
added to the description to make it clear what conferences are inactive.

Perhaps the list could be updated daily with "last new item" and "last 
response" information for each conference.  The information might clog 
the conference description too much.

Another possibility might be separate "help conf" lists, with one 
sorted by level of activity, another containing multiple lines of 
description for each conference (description + activity + fw info, or 
something like that).  People could then choose what list they see when 
they look for interesting conferences.  This should be easy to add to 
Picospan, I think; add some new "help" lists. "help confactivity", "help 
extendedconf", etc.  I don't remember how to add such information, or 
even if it's possible.

I've seen several attempts to clean out old, inactive conferences on 
M-Net, and they're all pretty intensive.  Someone, somewhere wants to 
save any conference which might be deleted.  So there's some alternative 
ways to let people skip the deadwood but not remove any conferences.

response 20 of 66:

Jan 20 22:21 UTC 2000

i never knew grex had a zen confrence. that is because it isn't listed in help
conf for some reason. i think the cfadmin should go over the list of confs
and make sure all of them are in help conf. i wonder if these groups are dead
beacuse noone know they exist.

response 22 of 66:

Jan 21 00:40 UTC 2000

what she said.

response 24 of 66:

Jan 21 04:07 UTC 2000

If you think an item should be linked, then you should send e-mail
to the appropriate fairwitness; that's the first step.  
Fairwitnesses can't be expected to know about everything in Agora
which might make a good link to their conference.