New co-op fair witness!

Nov 13 17:43 UTC 1996

TS has invited Dan Gryniewicz, login ID dang, to be the co-fair witness of
the co-op conference.  Welcome aboard, Dan!

Good choice, TS!

response 2 of 23:

Nov 14 10:49 UTC 1996

I agree - great choice.

response 4 of 23:

Nov 14 15:56 UTC 1996

That depends on the fairwitness. :)  The extra commands that picospan grants
a fairwitness are along the lines of linking items into the cf, freezing or
unfreezing items, retiring items, killing items, and login and logout screen
maintainence.   Socially, the roll of the fairwitness depends largely on the
cf in question.  The fuzzcourt cf, for example, was completely dominated by
the fw.  That was it's reason for existance, to be a court situation where
fuzz was the king, and all other people had rank/priviliges appointed by the
king. (I think I was a baron. :)  Other cf's, such as agora, the fw does very
very little in the way of social controll of the cf.  Here in co-op, I see
my main task as a mediator between people who are actually fighting, and then
to help guide discussion to keep it more or less on track. (Ajax has been
doing my job for me recently... :)  My technical jobs are to link in items
that are relevent to the running of grex, and as people ask for them, and to
keep an eye out for illegal or security breaking posts.  For example, if
someone entered an item with the cracked passwd file, it would by my job to
kill it as fast as possible.  Ditto if someone posted a uuencoded nude picture
of their 8 year old sister or something.  Other than those things, I am just
another participant of co-op.  (BTW, any decisions made about co-op I would
have to make with tsty, not unilaterally.)

response 6 of 23:

Nov 15 17:48 UTC 1996

I'd like the "conference creation log" and "conference deletion log" items
linked over.  Thanks!

response 8 of 23:

Nov 15 20:03 UTC 1996

any more?

response 10 of 23:

Nov 16 15:24 UTC 1996

If you link the cf start and end items over, they will be new too, as well
as boing slow because they are linked.  I'd say copy them.

response 12 of 23:

Nov 18 06:57 UTC 1996

TS?  I'm curious why you want to copy the items instead of linking them.
If they're linked, all the responses stay separate, so people can use commands
like "only 27" to see response 27, or "read since 1/1/96" to see a list of
conferences created in 1996.  If you copy the item over, people won't be able
to use those commands.

If you're concerned that the items might go away when the current coop
conference goes away: they will stick around.  Linked items are implemented
as Unix hard links, which means that if you delete the file in one place, it
continues to exist in the other place(s) it is linked to.

response 14 of 23:

Nov 18 17:53 UTC 1996

Actually, the way links are implemented in Picospan, linked items *are*
slower than non-linked items.  This is because the "sum" file in each
conference lists the time when each item was last updated.  If a linked
item is responded to in one conference, the "sum" file for the other
conferences won't be updated automatically.  To get the latest info about a
linked item, Picospan always checks the last update time of the file on the
disk, each time you read it, rather than using the info in the sum file.
Using the sum file is faster.  For non-linked items, Picospan does use the
sum file, which is faster.

response 16 of 23:

Nov 19 17:56 UTC 1996

Hm.  I think the "conference creation/deletion log" items are cool precisely
because they go back to the beginning of Grex.

response 18 of 23:

Nov 21 19:32 UTC 1996

What about the login screen for coop?  The enigma loginscreen is a hoot, and
becomes even more of an enigma is this one goes away.  [Although maybe that's
OK for enigma]

response 20 of 23:

Nov 24 14:33 UTC 1996

Well, it's better than what coop8 has.  "Opportunity" is misspelled.  It's
still overly long.  I'd suggest saying '"help intro"' instead of '"help
introduction"'.

response 22 of 23:

Nov 24 19:10 UTC 1996

I have a couple of things to say.  The first is something that I 
haven't tested but believe to be true.  The first block was the 
Co-op login screen and the remaining blocks (paragraphs) were 
part of the bulletin.  Correct?  

That said, I think that the text in the bulletin is excellent.  
It is very concise, clear, doesn't go against any of my beliefs
about Co-op or Grex, and leaves me with a very warm-fuzzy feeling.
I couldn't have written a better bulletin if I had tried for 
hours.  I do appreciate the spelling correction, and I do agree 
that "help intro" would be better than "help introduction".  

Now, I also agree with John that the login screen seems a little 
bit too terse.  I like his wording and wouldn't mind two lines 
(or a little more) if it would encourage more people to join the 
conference.  

All this, IMHO.