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| Author |
Message |
devnull
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motd bloat
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Jan 26 20:45 UTC 1999 |
I was moderately annoyed by the size of the motd when I logged in today.
There was a paragraph about newmenu, a paragraph about the auction,
a paragraph about a get-well card, a paragraph from STeve telling us that
there were problems yesterday, a paragraph about the board meeting, and the
birthdays. Six paragraphs.
I suppose that the get well card and the board meeting can reasonably
be expected to remain in the motd for many days consecutively; I think
the newmenu and auction paragraphs would be just as effective if they were
rotated.
It appears that there are 183 days each year on which birthdays are announced,
at present. That's about every other day on average.
So I'm inclined to suggest that on days when there are no birthdays, there
should be something choosen at random, which could include mention of
newmenu, mention of the auction, etc.
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| 4 responses total. |
scott
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response 1 of 4:
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Jan 27 12:14 UTC 1999 |
I like the idea of using the birthday section to automatically put up support
messages, etc. on empty days.
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steve
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response 2 of 4:
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Jan 27 18:22 UTC 1999 |
Mea Cupla. I know I've added to the bloat on more than one occaison.
The question is hoe to come up with a better way to explain things. For
example, when I don't put up a notice about outages, people seem to think
I'm the right person to ask "say, was Grex down last ....?" and there have
been times when I've gotten that many times in an afternoon. So I try to
err on the side of data, which of course adds to the bloat problem.
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devnull
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response 3 of 4:
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Jan 27 23:47 UTC 1999 |
Re #2: I'm actually much more annoyed by seeing the same text every day
for N months than being told of an outage once in a while.
Of course, the problem of the system being down and users complaining is
always an annoyance, even on a machine I run that only has a handful of
users. (I've had to ask over the phone `well, do you want me to fix it,
or do you want me to explain to you why it's broken?'.) I think that training
users to accept the idea that things will occasionally be down, and they
shouldn't worry about it, is the real solution.
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steve
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response 4 of 4:
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Jan 28 03:10 UTC 1999 |
Heh. Yeah, but when you have a community as large as that of Grex,
there are a LOT of people, any one of whom can fire off questions.
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