|
Grex > Coop12 > #132: Proposal to eliminate deceased conferences | |
|
| Author |
Message |
richard
|
|
Proposal to eliminate deceased conferences
| 
Sep 20 07:20 UTC 2002 |
Okay, following up on the previous item, I have identified the following
confs which have been inactive for numbers of years. Most no longer have
fairwitnesses or have fw's that are long since reaped. I think it does
not look good for grex to have dead and dormant confs. Every time a new
user comes here and tries the other conferences, and sees confs where
years have gone by without new posts, it does not look good. They will
think Grex is no longer a vital and happening place, that it is some
fossil of the past. Grex needs to tighten up its conferences list,
eliminate dead confs and combine some others.
As a start I propose elminating the following dead conferences::
Accordion
Ing
Hippie
Safety
glb
Hangout
In Between
Utne
Drfuzzy
Melvin (the Melvin conf hasn't had a new post since 1996!)
Pseudo
smiley
thezone
Vomit (not that many people even know grex HAS a vomit conf of course)
There are other fairly dead confs. Maybe combining some would be an idea.
I am fw of both the movies and tv confs, they are both fairly dead other
than linked items, so maybe they should be combined. Could combine Natur
and Science confs for instance.
Grex needs to streamline its conference menu. People see too many confs
are out there and don't know which ones are active, and see confs that too
similar in topic, they get confused and run away. I propose lets start by
putting the above listed totally dead confs out of their misery/
|
| 60 responses total. |
cmcgee
|
|
response 1 of 60:
|
Sep 20 08:24 UTC 2002 |
No, you have listed at least ten conferences that I check on a daily basis.
Your premise is flawed, and your solution to the problem is off track.
|
scott
|
|
response 2 of 60:
|
Sep 20 12:34 UTC 2002 |
There's some valuable history in most of those conferences.
|
mynxcat
|
|
response 3 of 60:
|
Sep 20 14:59 UTC 2002 |
I would be against deleting old cfs, I don't see the value. Are we running
out of space?
|
richard
|
|
response 4 of 60:
|
Sep 20 18:10 UTC 2002 |
the value is that if new users don't think grex is an active board, if
they see nothing but dead confs, they will leave. like it or not, grex has
been doing poorly conference-wise. If people don't read the confs, not
just long time users, but new users, grex has a problem. And to say grex
shouldn't address its conferencing problem, is to say you don 't care whether
grex ever grows or gets better at what it offers
|
mynxcat
|
|
response 5 of 60:
|
Sep 20 18:28 UTC 2002 |
Thats not true. I agree that we need to see more active cfs here. But I think
that deleting old ones because they're dead is not the answer. I would hate
to see some of the older cfs gone, they provide a great history lesson about
grex and about the people at that time
|
glenda
|
|
response 6 of 60:
|
Sep 20 20:57 UTC 2002 |
I have not heard of anyone leaving because of dead cfs. I find them to be
a repository of potentially useful info.
|
pfv
|
|
response 7 of 60:
|
Sep 20 20:59 UTC 2002 |
deletetion is a way to reclaim space from defunct shit..
archiving is a way to save space, as well as retain readability and space.
Richard generally has the wishes of a John-Wayne "over-the-top" type, I wish
folks would remember this - moments before they remember he's as useless as
tits on a Boarhog..
If grex could dump all the corpses into a "cemetery" - thereby saving space
- and still retain readability w/o a major effort, fine; otherwise it's a
waste.
(And, don't tell me you 'check them': that can be done the same way as
reading, if NOT FASTER, ok?)
|
pfv
|
|
response 8 of 60:
|
Sep 20 21:01 UTC 2002 |
goddamnit, learn to use a comma-spearated list joe friggin' jughead!
(same for all the other verbosity).
|
gull
|
|
response 9 of 60:
|
Sep 20 21:41 UTC 2002 |
Hasn't removing dead conferences been suggested at least twice already? It
didn't go anywhere last time, either, for the exact reasons people are
talking about this time.
|
other
|
|
response 10 of 60:
|
Sep 21 00:01 UTC 2002 |
Richard, Grex IS "some fossil of the past..." Live with it.
(It just happens to be a living fossil.)
|
mdw
|
|
response 11 of 60:
|
Sep 23 04:37 UTC 2002 |
Clearly we have packrats & neatnics. Personally, I'm a packrat.
|
richard
|
|
response 12 of 60:
|
Sep 23 09:16 UTC 2002 |
marcus, you are a packrat, but you fail to see the issue. I read board
minutes from various meetings and see little or nothing said about the
confs. Grex is supposed to be ABOUT the confs. Isn't that why you
started this place? If you care about this place, about all the work
you have put into it, you must see that you have to look after it.
Like when you grow a garden, you must pick the vegetables. The
conferences ARE everything. Just leaving them alone kills them just as
if you left ripe tomatoes on the vine. You MUST find a way to make
that garden grow.
And letting dead conferences fester, and letting board meeting after
board meeting go by without meaningful discussion on how to improve
what matters-- the conferences-- also hurts it. Your packrat mentality
HURTS grex. It does and maybe you just don't realize it. Grex is
dying, it is not attracting new users. Because of YOUR packrat
mentality. Every one of you who have that packrat mentality are
killing grex, because you are more satisfied with whatever grex was
than what it could be. You feel satisfied with what you've
accomplished and want no more. That isn't fair to grex. Grex is a
live board. It deserves people who think more of its future than its
past.
|
richard
|
|
response 13 of 60:
|
Sep 23 09:50 UTC 2002 |
and marcus I'll go you one further, because it is only stating the
obvious. You don't use grex for your primary conferencing anymore.
Neither does Steve Andre or Valerie Mates or most of its founders. Grex
was once a hip place, a cutting edge place for conferencing on the
internet. You went and found other places to conference. Why? Because
Grex died, it reached a ceratin plateau and went no further. And you were
satisfied with whatever grex had become, and didn't want to take it
further. It was too much hassle. Too much trouble. Grex is like a fad
that its biggest fans left behind. Grex deserves better. If you are u
sing another board more than grex, you should be saying why. Every one of
those abandoned conferences that I mentioned deserved better. They
deserved the longtime users of those boards to explain why they don;'t
use them anymore. Marcus, I've been around long enough to remember when
you and Steve and Valerie posted regularlyu . You don't anymore. tell
meor tell us why. Tell us why other boards are now more attractive than
grex>? these b oards here cant get any better unless we know. Steve
andre why dont you post anymore? Valerie why are your agora posts few and
far between these days? I rwmember when you were the best poster on that
conference!
I am not trolling, I simply am one of the few who remember what grex was
and wonder what happened. Grex IS the conferences. Put aside ten minutes
at every board meeting and talk about NOTHING but conferencing. Whjat it
was and waht it might be...y
|
other
|
|
response 14 of 60:
|
Sep 23 13:31 UTC 2002 |
Wow. Imagine what the impact might be if Richard actually had a cause
*worth* pursuing...
Scary!
|
glenda
|
|
response 15 of 60:
|
Sep 23 13:51 UTC 2002 |
I can sort of answer as to why STeve doesn't post more. A 1.5 hr one way
commute to work, 8-12 hour work day, a growing family (2 teens of our own and
a 3rd that lives with us), a wife that goes to school full time and works 3/4
time meaning someone else gets to pick up the stuff she used to do such as
cooking, shopping, cleaning, homework supervision (I still do some of it, just
not a much as I used to and he gets to add homework supervision of me as
well), a 100 year old house that needs major renovation.
Having had a stroke a year ago has also shifted his priorities a bit. As in
spending more time with his family.
|
other
|
|
response 16 of 60:
|
Sep 23 13:56 UTC 2002 |
I just figured it was because people stopped responding to Richard.
|
aruba
|
|
response 17 of 60:
|
Sep 23 13:59 UTC 2002 |
Richard, I think you said some things worth thinking about, so I will think
about them. Basically what I hear you saying is that on Grex, everything
about conferencing is cheap and easy, and as a result you think it has
become devalued, so that people don't respect it the way they once did.
Hmmm. I agree that it has been devalued. I think the growth of the net
accounts for a lot of the reason why. But it might be the case that we
could improve Grex's conferences by doing something here to make them more
valuable.
|
davel
|
|
response 18 of 60:
|
Sep 23 14:31 UTC 2002 |
I also don't think Richard's totally off the wall here. I think that users
who unexpectedly find themselves in a conference (or, sometimes, even an item)
whose last activity was years ago are often confused, and we can do things
to mitigate this. I do think that Richard's analysis of the problem is wrong,
and that his proposed solution is not a good idea, at all.
As far as his comments in #13, I'm not sure that he's right that Grex isn't
various people's primary conferencing place, is totally right. When I first
showed up on Grex, not all *that* long after it came on line, Marcus had
recently pretty much vanished from Grex (including responding to Grex-related
email), for over a year I think, because of the need to maintain other things
in his life; and life offline has certainly grown for Valerie & STeve.
Certainly the explosion of other forums has had an effect; I probably spend
more time monitoring a handful of (moderately low-volume!) mailing lists than
I ever *should* have spent on Grex, these days. I don't know that Grex needs
to aim to be anyone's driving passion.
|
cmcgee
|
|
response 19 of 60:
|
Sep 23 15:05 UTC 2002 |
I personally read Valeries' almost-daily-postings each time I do my cflist.
And telling people that they MUST feel the same about something now as they
did 15-20 years ago is mind-boggling.
I don't mind conferences being grouped into categories that indicate how often
current users post to them. I do mind conferences being deleted. I often
go searching in a conference because there is a lot of information that can
be mined, and having the information arranged under "headings" or "topics"
(ie conferences) speeds up my data-mining.
|
prp0
|
|
response 20 of 60:
|
Sep 23 15:53 UTC 2002 |
There is an important difference between deleting and archiving. It appears
that no one except Richard wants to delete things.
To use the books in a Library example, things at the branch library which
haven't been read in six months shouldn't be tossed out, then should be
moved to the main branch.
The problem is not just dead conferences, it is also dead items in active
conferences. Picospan helps a bit by making only the first and last items
new when someone joins. There are at least two problems with this:
- The browse command lists 100+ items, with no indication of which ones
are active, or even how old then are.
- When someone does respond to a dead item, the new person is shown
hundreds and hundreds of old responses. As I remember they are shown
without a date, which makes things worse.
My suggestion: Do NOT get rid of the "dead" stuff, move it somewhere.
This could potentially get rid of coop1, ..., coopN. There would be just
coop and archived-coop, which might make finding fairly old things easier.
|
cmcgee
|
|
response 21 of 60:
|
Sep 23 16:15 UTC 2002 |
Oh, that gives me an idea. If the browse command could show any itmes that
had been active in the last year as a default, and "browse all" would show
you the older items, then newcomers would see the more active items. Maybe
the fw could set how far back the default showed. Like some conferences, the
past month is good, in others, the past year.
|
pfv
|
|
response 22 of 60:
|
Sep 23 16:35 UTC 2002 |
Why not use a setting? per user? Which the default being a year, and the
FW's able to specify less, (allowing for busy areas).
|
richard
|
|
response 23 of 60:
|
Sep 23 18:48 UTC 2002 |
re: aruba's post back a few, that is exactly what I've been saying. the confs
have become devalued. the shell of grex is still around and well kept, but
what is inside it, what is its essence, is being neglected. And once again
I am NOT advocating deleting old items that are worth keeping. Just moving
those items to an archive conf and closing dead confs. Janc is grex's
conferencing champion, because he came up with Backtalk, so grex's confs are
now web accessible. But most of those confs so nicely displayed on ba cktalk
are DEAD. So whats the point? If the purpose of grex is to be a museum,
then fine. But if the purpose of grex is to be a virtual town hall, a place
for live, current discussion, then the approach needs to change. The
conferences need to be better organized, and better maintained, and better
promoted.
|
other
|
|
response 24 of 60:
|
Sep 23 19:58 UTC 2002 |
Feel free to promote.
|