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richard
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Grex conferencing woes
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Sep 20 06:17 UTC 2002 |
I think Grex needs to address once again the fact that it has so many dead
conferences. Grex has some 100 different conferences, and I went browsing
a little while ago and found so many that are dead and dormant that it is
sad. Some haven't had new posts in years. What can be done? There are
probably a lot of people interested in those topics that don't even know
they are there.
Perhaps Grex should start a "Conferencing Overhaul", whereby attention is
given to the vast wasteland of dead conferences, and those that can be
revived are given new fairwitnesses, or restarts, and those that are dead
(like is there any need for the accordion conf anymore, who reads it>?)
are reaped.
And would it be possible for a program to be set up to scan all grex confs
on a periodic basis and flag all items that are active in confs other than
coop and agora, and link them to a new "Grex's Active Items" conference?
This was attempted previously with the "archives" conf but that attempt
failed miserably because it wasn't automated and was reliant upon having
fw's with continued interest monitoring and linking items from other
items. If that concept is taken a step further, is automated, and ALL
active (with a set definition for "active" to be determined, whether it
means this item had posts in the last week or the last month) items in
confs other than agora and coop are linked into a separate conf, so that
you don't have to hit each and every conf to FIND those items, this might
help. Surely this could be done via backtalk at least.
The idea is that it has not been enough to just have the confs out there,
and provide a list of them. That doesn't entice people to come there.
You have to bring the items to them.
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| 45 responses total. |
cmcgee
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response 1 of 45:
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Sep 20 08:22 UTC 2002 |
I read the accordion conf. I use a .cf file to monitor activity in all my
favorite conferences. I see newcomers finding slow conferences, making
entries and stirring up lots of activity. For example, the Femme conference
got some serious attention early in the summer.
I also think that the items are "brought to" agora when it seems like there
would be a wider audience. This does not rely on the fairwitness; often these
requests are made by the readers of the conferences.
There is also a flip side to the "privacy" afforded by our current setup.
For example, there is a current item in Agora to which I have not
responded because it is in such a public place. When Agora rolls, I'll
start responding in the more obscure conference that it is linked to. If
it were linked to some "Active" conference, I'd never respond.
I think you are right to observe that there are a lot of conferences that
don't see much activity. However your conclusion that the cause is too
many old responses stored in those conferences, and your scheme to delete
all those old responses and gather the new ones into a single spot misses
the point.
Grex and its conferences are a very old-fashioned technology that does not
appeal to many Internet users. We have a fair number of newcomers who
show up in Agora, make one posting, and are never seen again. We also
have a fair number of newcomers who show up in one of the more obscure
conferences, make a posting _that_is_quickly_responded_to_, and never come
back to see the response. Newcomers are finding items of interest, but
they are not staying around.
I think the publicity committee has identified the problem pretty well: we
have a hard time identifying potential new users and enticing them here.
There does not seem to be another group in the real world who would have a
big overlap between its membership and the Grex target audience.
I am firmly against removing old conferences. I see enough activity in
them to show that newcomers are finding them and posting to them. We just
don't have a very high load of newcomers.
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gull
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response 2 of 45:
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Sep 20 14:52 UTC 2002 |
I'd be against deleting old postings. There's a lot of interesting history
in even a "dead" conference. Looking through some of the older postings in
the micros conference is like a trip back in time. To me those old writings
are valuable bits of computer and Internet history, and it'd be a shame to
see them disappear.
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pfv
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response 3 of 45:
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Sep 20 15:13 UTC 2002 |
Is it possible to compress the inactives, and make them R/O from !bbs and
the Backtalk interface? Save lots of space.
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gull
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response 4 of 45:
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Sep 20 15:18 UTC 2002 |
Disk is cheap. I think right now we have more of a shortage of CPU cycles
than we do disk space, so I don't think compression is a good plan.
Besides, that'd just ensure the conferences would stay dead. As it is now,
every so often someone makes a posting and wakes things up again.
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mynxcat
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response 5 of 45:
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Sep 20 15:57 UTC 2002 |
Like the enigma cf is suddenly hopping
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richard
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response 6 of 45:
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Sep 20 18:16 UTC 2002 |
most new users won't know how or care to set up .cflists, but they
might still read selected confs IF they appear active. All I'm saying
is Grex has to present its conferences better, and combining or eliminating
old confs is a way to do that.
you could even preserve the old messages, before a conf is deleted, link
all the items, or at least the good ones, into an olditems conf, which would
list the item and the conf it originaly appeared in
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dpc
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response 7 of 45:
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Sep 20 19:41 UTC 2002 |
I agree that dead conferences should be removed. Otherwise, having
all this dead material lying around gives newbies the impression
that Grex is, as a whole, comatose.
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glenda
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response 8 of 45:
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Sep 20 20:55 UTC 2002 |
Re 0: The Archives CF was set up for:
" Item 1 entered Mon, Jul 13, 1992 (00:12) by Daniel A. Napolitano (keats)
archival diggings
<item is frozen>
this conference is for the ghosts of agora past. items deemed specially
pleasing or interesting by the grex community will be deposited here to
be forever admired by old and new users alike. if you know an item you'd
like to appear here (from agora or another conference), please mail either
of the fair witnesses or post its name on the nomination item that will
appear on agora during the last month of each restart's tenure.
thanks, and welcome.
Response not possible. Pass?"
not to keep track of active items in other CFs. Get your facts right before
you start making claims.
As for killing "dead" CFs, I say keep them, they do have good info in them and
they do get revived periodically as someone finds them.
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gull
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response 9 of 45:
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Sep 20 21:40 UTC 2002 |
Re #6: Depends. If they use Backtalk, setting up a .cflist is pretty easy
and intuitive. I bet more newbies use Backtalk than Picospan, these days.
Re #7: I never got that impression. Remember that the first
conference every newbie sees is Agora, and it's always hopping. I
didn't find it shocking or particularly disappointing that others were
less active. Heck, it was a week or so before I figured out *how* to join
other conferences.
I really think people are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really
exist, here. But then, I'm not much of a neat freak. The people suggesting
we need to clean out old conferences that are lying around are probably the
sorts of people who arrange perfectly-sharpened pencils in neat rows on
their otherwise empty desks. ;)
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scott
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response 10 of 45:
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Sep 20 22:56 UTC 2002 |
Richard is trolling.
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mynxcat
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response 11 of 45:
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Sep 20 23:08 UTC 2002 |
I'm a relative "newbie" and I use picospan. But I do have my cflist set up
too
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other
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response 12 of 45:
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Sep 20 23:49 UTC 2002 |
I get the impression Richard doesn't troll, he just IS a troll.
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gelinas
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response 13 of 45:
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Sep 21 00:21 UTC 2002 |
Hmm.... I don't really know how active the most recent conference I discovered
is; I've not had time to catch up in it, so I don't know how much has been
added since I joined it. However, 'twould be really sad to never have heard
of that bakery-supply store on Washinton, I think it was.
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janc
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response 14 of 45:
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Sep 21 01:48 UTC 2002 |
Some conferencing programs are able to generate pretty elaborate statistics
on conferences. It's something I've been wanting to do for years, but haven't
gotten around to yet. Interesting things to track might include:
For each conference:
How many users have read items there in the last X days?
How many users have posted messages there in the last X days?
How many postings have there been in the last X days?
How many bytes have been posted in the last X days?
How many users have the conference on their hot list?
How many users have been in the conference?
and so on. You could also collect statistics on items, so you could easily
find the most active ones, wherever they are. You could even collect
statistics on users (how much do they post? what is the average length of
their post? how many people have twit-listed them?). OK, maybe we shouldn't
do user statistics.
Maybe I'll get to that someday, or maybe someone else will.
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aruba
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response 15 of 45:
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Sep 21 13:25 UTC 2002 |
Re #10,12: I think we should address Richard's suggestion, and not Richard
himself.
I have some sympathy with this idea, but I think we could find a compromise
somewhere between deleting old conferences and leaving things as they are.
For instance, the "display conf" text could be organized better to show
which conferences are more active than others. That way, if people were
looking for an active discussion, they wouldn't get an inactive one by
mistake, but they could still seek out an inactive one (and maybe jumpstart
it) if they wanted to.
BTW I think this is at least similar to something Richard said.
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prp0
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response 16 of 45:
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Sep 21 15:55 UTC 2002 |
One thought would be to list the conferences by level of activity, rather
than by subject areas.
I think the real problem here is more fundamential. There are about one
hundred confernces. Is this too many or too few. The answer is both.
I also think that it would be better to move inactive items to an archive
conference than to delete conferences. This is sort of what restarting
Agora every three months does.
N.B. Any "solution" to this problem will come up against the limits of
picospan, and thus could be fairly labor intensive.
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mary
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response 17 of 45:
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Sep 21 18:20 UTC 2002 |
I really like the idea of the conferences being listed in
order of recent activity.
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richard
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response 18 of 45:
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Sep 22 02:54 UTC 2002 |
the conf list shown in "help conf" is incomplete. It lists some 100
confs but doesn't list some of the newer ones, and possibly some of the older
ones. the list should be updated.
I mean the list doesn't even include the Steve conference (what is that conf
anyway? a conf for discussing problems unique to those with the name Steve
or something?)
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i
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response 19 of 45:
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Sep 22 11:45 UTC 2002 |
Hmmm...how about listing the "active" cf's before the "inactive" cf's in
each section (Computers, Lifestyles, etc.) of "help conf", and flagging
the inactive ones as such?
Can folks agree *both* on doing this and on a definition of "active"?
What authority is needed - cfadm's whim, agreement of the affected fw's,
agreement of all fw's, Board, or ???
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remmers
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response 20 of 45:
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Sep 22 16:38 UTC 2002 |
The judgement of what "active" means is inherently subjective, and
furthermore, some users might be looking for conferences that are
reasonably active but not *too* active. So rather than making
judgement calls and trying to second-guess what users are looking
for, I'd favor tweaking "help conf" so that it shows for each
conference a measure of recent activity -- e.g. the number of
posts in the last X days (where X would have to be decided on,
of course). Sorting conference by activity level in each
category might not be a bad idea. It would require writing some
software, but it's not a complex programming job.
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remmers
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response 21 of 45:
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Sep 22 16:39 UTC 2002 |
(In other words -- inform the users, then let them decide.)
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aruba
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response 22 of 45:
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Sep 22 16:59 UTC 2002 |
I think you should feel empowered to make such arrangements as you see fit,
Walter.
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davel
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response 23 of 45:
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Sep 22 21:06 UTC 2002 |
Agreed.
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fireball
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response 24 of 45:
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Sep 23 02:26 UTC 2002 |
I really like the suggestion in #20. A possible extension to it being to then
sort the list by that measure of activity...or not. Depending on
implimentation, a flag (not) to sort could be moderately non-difficult.
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