A house divided against itself... (a suggestion for the conferences)

Mar 2 23:33 UTC 1997

Recently, I have gotten the impression that the conferences on grex are not
doing as well as they used to be.  It seems to me that part of this is due
to the changing nature of grex users--more people using grex as a mail drop,
or a place to do party and chat from--but part of this is also due the the
fact that we have many more conferences than we used to competing for users.
While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it seems to me that is has gone
a bit too far.  A good example, among the conferences I participate in, are
the mud, rpg, videogames, oldrpg, and greatring conferences.  Originally,
there was one conference devoted to roleplaying games, the 'darksun'
conference, and one conference devoted to games in general, the 'games'
conference.  Now, however, there are five conferences on this topic.  All of
these conferences are slightly different--mud's and video games are not
exactly the same, and there is a slight difference between mud's and
roleplaying 'in person'--but all of the subtopics discussed in these
conferences are part of a larger topic: 'games'.
Likewise, there are four conferences on sexuality and gender issues, nine on
the arts (or more, depending on what you think falls in that category), eight
on the organization and running of some aspect of grex, three for testing
various things, two for storing old items, etcetera.  While condensing the
nine or more 'artistic' conferences into one would be a bit extreme, I can
see no reason for writing and poetry to be separate, or for music and
classicalmusic, comics and books, or cinema and video to remain separate. 
Although each of these pairs contains two conferences on slightly different
topics, they are certainly compatible.
The reason I bring this up is that I can some conferences seem to be dying
for lack of users, and others could certainly benefit from more users than
they currently have.  The five games conferences are once again a good
example--greatring and iq are near-dead, for instance.  
Also, those users who are interested in games are spread over five
conferences.  While video games and something like the five-letter word game
are clearly separate things, this does not mean that a participant in one
could not contribute to the other.  Many times, the most interesting items
in a conference are those that are linked to several other conferences,
because you hear the opinions of users who would not normally join such a
discussion but who have something to say about it.
It seems to me that grex would stand to benefit from such groups of
smal conferences being combined into large conferences.  Any thoughts?

response 2 of 94:

Mar 3 01:18 UTC 1997

I think it would be great if there were an easy and understandable way for
people to generate a conference list.  This would allow them to automatically
scroll through those conferences they are interested in.  

Wasn't there a "Menu" item to build a conference list?

response 4 of 94:

Mar 3 08:19 UTC 1997

I guess I should mention that in the last week I have recruited three 
participants for the music conference out of party chat, and one more 
discovered the conference independently, so right now the music 
conference is entering a period of prosperity.
 
Maybe the Grex conference users like having most things lumped together
in agora.  I know I do.
 
This is an exact echo of a discussion M-net had...

response 6 of 94:

Mar 3 15:40 UTC 1997

Idont use .cflists generally because I dont like to read myconfs in the same
order, and some times I dont want to read particular confs on a particular
day.  Some confs, like poetry, you cant dojustice to reading them in the
context of a .cflist because you only have a certainamount of time to read
all the other confs.   

what I've often wished is that each user could have a personal conf area where
theycould link entire items from other confs.  Soif there is one item in one
conf you want to keep up with without having to enter that conf all
the time, you could link it there.  I think thatwould do more to encourage
people to keep up with individual items than a .cflist.

Letting people create personalized conferences doubtless reqauires more coding
though.  Marcus will probably callme a cucumber for suggesting it.
*sigh*

response 8 of 94:

Mar 3 16:38 UTC 1997

I imagine there is a social dynamic to these things, just as there is in
parties and other social processes.  Right now Agora seems to be in a good
balance.  There is usually some discussion going on there that I'm interested
in; and each time I sign on there are usually some interesting responses to
read, but not so many that I'm overwhelmed.  If a lot more people got involved
there would probably be more need for other conferences.  It's easier to
forget uninteresting items in Agora than to search out interesting items
elsewhere.

Good idea, to publicize the .cflist procedure.

response 10 of 94:

Mar 3 19:43 UTC 1997

Richard, I for one am not going to call you a cucumber for suggesting the
personalized conference idea.
  
Instead, I'm going to call you a cucumber for not realizing it already exists.
  
Grex policy allows anyone who wants a conference to come into coop (in the
appripriate item) and ask for a conference. Unless the person who asks for
it decides against it, it's createdregardless of any hue or cry that may
erupt. As FW, you could then proceed to link all of your favorite items to
that conference. I'm sure many, many conferences would jump at the chance to
put you into your own conference, Richard.

If you don't like .cflists, don't use them. That's simple, eh?

And the point to having conferences if everything is linked elsewhere is that
not every item will be linked to every conference. the reason fo rhaving
linking in the first pplace is that many many items are relveant to multiple
conferences.

response 12 of 94:

Mar 3 22:18 UTC 1997

Closed conferences violate the principles of Grex, Richard, haven't you been
paying attention?
  
Staff can't have a closed conference, why should you?

response 14 of 94:

Mar 3 23:38 UTC 1997

Nothing, Orinoco. I think Richard's idea is pure idiocy. I'm just humoring
him. It *might* be cool to have a "Brighn's Favorite Items" conference, where
I picked out all my fave items and let my friends see what I thought was cool
about grex. But I'm not going to suggest it.

New user should provide an option to generate a .cflist. I like the
user-friendly menu idea even better. The question is, is anyone who has the
savvy to do either wiling to do either?

response 16 of 94:

Mar 4 01:22 UTC 1997

#14...nope, picospan is marcus's baby but as I've been told countless times,
it is tied up in copyright purgatory and noone knows who can do what with it.
Thats why I was saying that it doesnt help grex to be using an interface that
cant be modified in any basic way.  Although somehow I doubt the skies would
fall if Marcus put out a new version.

response 18 of 94:

Mar 4 03:13 UTC 1997

Perhaps the conference list which is presented to users should be 
divided into "live" conferences and "dormant" conferences.
 
One could argue that by listing dormant conferences we encourage new users 
to avoid them.  But perhaps by making new users find the live conferences
on their own, we drive them away from all the specialty conferences.
???

response 20 of 94:

Mar 4 05:07 UTC 1997

I know this is drift, but I'm going to go back to Richard's idea for a minute.
A few people seem to have pounced on it, probably looking as much at who the
idea came from as what the idea is.  I too will admit that I generally see
responses from Richard and just assume they're gonig to be dumb ideas since
they usually are.

In this case, though, Richard's idea does sound good from the user interface
standpoint.  Picospan and Backtalk, in their current form do not support what
he's suggesting (other than each person having a full individual conference,
but that would get unweildly very quickly), and putting the capability in
probably wouldn't be all that easy.  Still, if we were designing a
conferencing system from the ground up, it would be a feature I would want
to put in.  Indeed, a lot of more modern software packages do have features
like that.

response 22 of 94:

Mar 4 13:54 UTC 1997

While I'm not so sure about other topics, I certainly see a three way merger
of Muds, RPG, and Great Ring as a sensible idea.  I also feel that this would
bring life back to otherwise "dead" conferences.  Certainly I have my reasons
for the infrequency of my responses in Great Ring, what with being a college
student and all, but looking at a conference with zero responses for over a
month and a half is ludicrous.  The problem I see is even if we did vie to
merge conferences, I don't see anyway to do it: perhaps restart them all as
one (i.e., all fws become the fws of the left over conference), link items
to the new conference, and when finished destroy the old conferences?

response 24 of 94:

Mar 4 16:54 UTC 1997

My favorite conf is the Safety conf, it hasnt had a new item in over
three years and hasnt had a new response in any of the exsisting items in
nearly that long (last new response was May of 1994).  It is so quiet and
peaceful there! :)

Seriously though, how difficult would it be to have a "!create" command
that would allow users to automatically create an empty conf in their home
directory where they could link their favorite items from other confs?
This would justbe a place where they can store and bookmark their favorite
items.  Desireable when you have a slowinterface.

A while back, STeve Ithink produced a list of conferences ranked by number
ofparticipationfiles.  I think itwouldbe interesting to see that done again.