You are not logged in. Login Now
 0-24   25-49   50-74   75-99   100-124   125-149   150-174   175-199   200-224 
 225-249   250-274   275-299   300-324   325-334      
 
Author Message
i
Grex Town Hall -- How do we move forward? - Fall, 2010 Mark Unseen   Sep 26 04:13 UTC 2010

This item is for capturing opinions and ideas about how Grex can move
forward, what Grex can do to encourage more people to use the system,
and what we want Grex to provide in terms of services or applications.
334 responses total.
cross
response 1 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 26 13:55 UTC 2010

Was this meant for Agora?
jgelinas
response 2 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 26 14:04 UTC 2010

Looks like a good place for it to me.
jgelinas
response 3 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 26 14:04 UTC 2010

Of course, it might be nice were it linked back to coop.
tsty
response 4 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 26 15:47 UTC 2010

  
baord meeting this evening .. The GREX board meeting  will
start at 6:30 p.m.  I hope that this timing will work better. Board
meetings are open to all.  

kentn
response 5 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 26 16:20 UTC 2010

Yes, this item was meant for agora (at the Board's request).  We wanted
to capture ideas for improving Grex on an on-going basis.  Of course,
people tend to use the item for announcements and off-topic questions,
but that's par for the course around here.  The idea of putting this
item in agora was to get it wider exposure, since most users don't read
the coop cf.

As to linking to coop, that can be done (and has: see coop item 284) if
we want to collect ideas in a place where they won't disappear with the
changing seasons (actually they don't disappear but they become harder
to find).

If you'd like to see what the previous Town Hall item was about, see
coop item 278 or the previous agora (summer item 6).  There are a lot of
discussions and ideas there.  If you'd like to continue them, feel free.
Old coop items are also good for ideas if you'd like to resurrect them
here.  You'll find that many of the current ideas have been discussed
for years and years already (with the same results).

What Grex needs to do is move beyond the discussion phase, choose some
reasonable ideas, and start implementing them.  As I've said before,
many ideas which have been proposed to date are ones we can try and then
remove or modify, if they don't work as expected.  So, keep an open
mind.
keesan
response 6 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 27 13:02 UTC 2010

Email would be more usable if grex would dump any mails with Subject:
=?koi8-r.  At least 90% of spams recently are from Russia, and it would save
a lot of disk space not to be storing them in multiple mail accounts.  I do
get Russian mails from real people, with real subject lines, never this one.
richard
response 7 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 27 16:05 UTC 2010

the web page needs to be more interactive.  web email. web chat .etc 
Need to face the fact that only minimal users now access grex in any
other way.
rcurl
response 8 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 27 17:18 UTC 2010

Does that make me a "minimal user"?
keesan
response 9 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 27 21:00 UTC 2010

I must also be minimal.  I hate web access.
tsty
response 10 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 27 22:42 UTC 2010

  
guress i;m monimal as welll.   
  
that said, web access does need ot improve considerably, imo.
  
cli access is plenty good, but it;s rally fallen out of favor for the
majority of surfers. 
  
richard
response 11 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 27 23:32 UTC 2010

re #8,9, sorry but yes you guys are minimal, you guys are unix
dinosaurs.  grex can only ever be signficant again if it moves into the
modern era.
keesan
response 12 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 00:24 UTC 2010

Dinosaurs take up a lot more space than a text file.
nharmon
response 13 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 02:14 UTC 2010

You know, if I were to sum up modern web design; minimalist, simplified,
and streamlined would be words I would use. 

Richard doesn't know what he is talking about.
keesan
response 14 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 02:31 UTC 2010

I see a lot of really bloated websites.
nharmon
response 15 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 12:15 UTC 2010

A lot of websites need modernization.
richard
response 16 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 14:47 UTC 2010

re #13 neither does nharmon if he doesn't realize that grex will never
get new users, younger users, without a new approach, more interactive,
to its web page.
keesan
response 17 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 15:00 UTC 2010

Modernization is not always an improvement.  A seed saving organization that
I belong to has its catalog on the internet now.  It shows only the first few
sentences of four entries from each page (which has dozens of entries) and
is 200K in size because of all the fancy programming and their insistence on
including a long list of all the varieties offered, on each page (instead of
a link back to a list).  Contains about .5K of useful info, then you need to
go to another page to see the rest of the entry.  A lot of the users live in
farm country and could not get broadband if they wanted it.  Dialup was taking
40 sec to load each page (with 2 pages per entry).  The fancy fonts,
backgrounds, etc. for each variety wasted a lot of this space.  Plain text
(or plain HTML) could have produced a page listing everything about 30
vegetables in 2K or so that everyone could have read.  Form over function.
twinkie
response 18 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 16:37 UTC 2010

re: 16
How do you suppose a whiz-bang web page is going to entice new or younger
users, when there's already an oversaturation of places to talk about whatever
you want, through the magic of PHPBB? 

I don't mean that to take a shot, but setting up a web BBS is literally as
easy as clicking "Install" and slapping a logo on top of a premade skin.

richard
response 19 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 16:45 UTC 2010

I'm saying that in the situation Grex is in, there is no reason NOT to 
overhaul the web page.  There is no status quo here to fall back on.  
Grex is either going to change to survive or it isn't.  The stats 
clearly show that very few people dial in or telnet in anymore.  Any 
improvements have to be geared toward those using the website.
slynne
response 20 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 17:01 UTC 2010

Well richard, I am sure that if you would like to overhaul the webpage
and then submit your designs to the board, they will be fairly
considered. 
richard
response 21 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 17:09 UTC 2010

re #20 I didn't say that I had the expertise to do this myself.  It is 
useless to "ask for suggestions" in my opinion, when the board won't 
even consider the suggestions and then says, 'do it yourself'  This 
attitude gets grex nowhere.  Why even enter this item if nobody wants 
to change anything?
mary
response 22 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 17:35 UTC 2010

We want to move forward.  We don't have any volunteer movers at present.
slynne
response 23 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 17:51 UTC 2010

FWIW, I am not on the board and have nothing to do with this item. I
just find the way you make your suggestions to be kind of obnoxious.
That is my own opinion and doesn't represent the opinions of anyone
else. 
nharmon
response 24 of 334: Mark Unseen   Sep 28 18:16 UTC 2010

Yes it does, slynne, it represents my opinions too.
 0-24   25-49   50-74   75-99   100-124   125-149   150-174   175-199   200-224 
 225-249   250-274   275-299   300-324   325-334      
Response Not Possible: You are Not Logged In
 

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss