response 11 of 79:

Apr 20 16:16 UTC 2017

i would use a gopherspace here on grex. i'm a big fan and currently am trying
to leave w3/html behind. this includes of course replacing my http home with
a script that simply formats my gopherspace & phlog to the most minimal
hypertext possible. anyway i think the number of us interested in doing such
a thing is growing, especially as the w3c's concern for user rights is
shrinking. see http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw for great example of
how gopher can be visible to w3 users ... i recommend gopher://sdf.org as
a test uri to enter. i think the demand for a non-commercial(izable) protocol
is going to increase as even non-savvy end-users notice their freedoms
dwindling on the w3 specs to come. some speak of potential secure gopher, other
such oddities ... i argue that gopher is perfect as is, and any modifications
that need to be done can be done through the way it's retrieved via w3 (the
protocol that won, for now anyway, it has won and that is that). in the unix
philosophy sense, i speak. gopher is perfect. it does exactly what it is
supposed to do, and no more and no less. i'll note that i'm more interested in
maintaining and cultivating the user base here at grex than i am in
implementing a new protocol instance, but should sensible priorities permit, i
would certainly make very serious use of a grex gopherspace.

response 13 of 79:

Apr 21 18:54 UTC 2017

Another reason to recommend gopher, is it looks georgous on mobile devices.
Have you seen the overbite client on android (aswell as firefox)?
http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/sc?android   
It looks even better - for real - on my smartphone (which only has a small
screen compared to most peoples). It is a dream to navigate, and on mobile
devices - i think you see the limitiations of the WWW design fashions we have
all been aquainted with. 

response 15 of 79:

May 18 23:50 UTC 2017

The point is the same as the point in using a shell-based bulletin board
system when there is a web-based interface available.

As you mentioned in your post on SDF's BBOARD, a gopher server on Grex,
especially on with per-user gopherspace available, would be a feature that
would attract some new users to Grex, even if it's interesting to only a
minority of the user base.

response 17 of 79:

May 19 09:25 UTC 2017

I understand your point. I don't think people are interested in gopher because
it does anything that can't be achieved in HTTP by sticking to a spartan page
design aesthetic, but the freedom (from dreaded HTML) and simplicity in
publishing content with gopher. You can post your plain text documents as-is,
and a menu is little more than a list of file names an titles.

With gopher you don't have the option of getting fancy/complicated.

There is also a factor of nostalgia/curiosity for a road-not-taken in the
history of computing. A few different decisions in the early 1990s and we
might all be now using the World-Wide Gopherspace instead of the WWW.

response 19 of 79:

May 24 14:50 UTC 2017

*shrug*

Okay, I guess it doesn't hurt anything. There's a gopher server running
on Grex now.

response 21 of 79:

May 26 11:19 UTC 2017

Veronica will only work on Archie if she thinks Betty is going to steal him
away from her.

response 23 of 79:

May 28 18:42 UTC 2017

excuse my ignorance, but how do we access the gopher server? I fire up the
gopher client and i get 'The gopher Project' server as the home server. How
do we go about adding content to the grex server? :)

response 25 of 79:

May 29 00:36 UTC 2017

P.S. Although the above file is accessible via Gopher, you can also read it
with cat, more, less, or your preferred file viewer.

response 27 of 79:

May 29 03:54 UTC 2017

The file is partially restored and now provides a hint for starting your
exploration of Gopherspace. More later.

response 29 of 79:

May 29 09:43 UTC 2017

Nice gopherhole papa! I see the server now at: gopher://grex.org/  which
has no links to other servers as yet, but i am so happy to see an new gopher
server on the net \o/. It won't be long untill a few gopher sites link to grex,
for sure. Just one thing: it would be nice if we could start say the default
gopher client with gopher://grex.org/ and have links on there to the
other main servers etc... and maybe we could have a tutorial, for the complete
newcomer, on the grex server's main menu: great work!! :) 

response 31 of 79:

May 29 17:16 UTC 2017

I've rebuilt and completed my tutorial for accessing Gopherspace. View the
file:

  ~papa/public_gopher/README.1st

You can also access the file with Gopher at the address:

  gopher://grex.org/0/~papa/README.1st

  (use your favorite Gopher client)

I've also created a tutorial for starting your own Grex gopherhole:

  gopher://grex.org/0/~papa/README.2nd

You can also access these files and other Gopherspace phenomena from my
gopherhole's main menu:

  gopher://grex.org/1/~papa

I've tried to make both tutorials as simple as possible for fellow grexers.
Please try them out and let me know how I did.

response 33 of 79:

May 30 01:37 UTC 2017

Let me be clear what I mean:

I *personally* don't want to put a lot of time and effort into
supporting  Gopher, but I'm certainly willing to take content and
marshal it over into the  gopher area, make changes to the server, etc.
If folks use gopher, and most  importantly if it becomes a draw that
pulls people into Grex then I'm fine  with it. If it doesn't, then I'll
take it down (it is, after all, yet another  unencrypted service running
on Grex that could become a security issue). But  if no one is using it,
then no one will notice. :-)

I'd be slightly more enthusiastic about a low-markup set of static blog
web  sites, to be totally honest. Gopher as a protocol is a lot less
interesting. A  gopher-style thing via HTTP, with minimalist content (a
la Markdown) that's  directly interpreted in lieu of HTML is a lot more
interesting.