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| Author |
Message |
| 16 new of 115 responses total. |
sidhe
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response 100 of 115:
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Jul 31 22:06 UTC 1995 |
Carson, dear fellow, no matter how much UNIX I learn, there
are plenty of things that cannot be done here, without involving a
"have". I was, indeed, not responding only to STeve's first
response, but the fact that the majority of staff response was
negative. As it turns out, running it from my home directory was
what I had in mind, as was stated last coop. Building it myself, or
with a small unit of VOLUNTEERS (staff was not even intended to feel
that they were at all implied to act) was what I had in mind, when
PicoSpan was found to be incompatible. So, old boy, please do not
paint me as not trying to work with a problematic situation-
every time I decided that I could go with the aforementioned
solutions, more opposition came forward, typically from people
who have enough pull here to block any such effort.
I was willing to give it a try. I was opposed at every turn
by SOMEONE, until finally it was stated to me that I could have
the conference without the censor feature, and that was all that
I would find no high-powered resistance to. That was not acceptable.
Not when I knew it was feasable to do it the way I had in mind,
using the solutions given beforehand, and certainly not when the
only reason the PicoSpan friendly one was my only option was
because of opposition by closed-mindedness, not hardware or
software.
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mju
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response 101 of 115:
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Aug 1 04:39 UTC 1995 |
Many people seem to get confused between what individual members of the Grex
staff say, and what the Official Grex Staff Opinion is. The Official Grex
Staff Opinion actually doesn't exist for most things, because most of the
staff members are too busy with other things to bother getting together to
form one. Instead, there are many people here who are on the Grex staff but
also participate in the conferences, and have opinions of their own. Most
of the time when they enter a response they are not speaking for the Official
Grex Staff, but are speaking their own personal opinion. This is usually the
case for Greg, STeve, Valerie, myself, and the other staff members who are
always getting blamed for blocking ideas or setting Official Grex Staff
Policy.
As I recall, sidhe, you were told that you were welcome to set up your own
conferencing software and enforce whatever rules you like in it. However,
none of the Unix-literate people that you asked were willing to put their own
personal time towards the development of such a system. Implementing such
a system within PicoSpan is not practical, because the decision of who can
censor responses is made on a systemwide basis and is compiled into the
PicoSpan executable. Many of the staff felt -- this is their own personal
opinion, you understand, not an official staff policy statement -- that using
a lot of Grex resources to implement such a system was not really in the best
interests of the members and users, since such a system would likely not
appeal to many people, and would detract from what many of them see to be the
main focus of Grex (PicoSpan conferencing). If you really want to, someone
on staff is probably willing to perform the necessary administrative
technicalities such that you can run such a system safely without having to
permit all the conferencing files world-writable, and so forth. But you
probably shouldn't look for the Grex staff to provide programming resources
on this project, since it's just not something that interests them a great
deal.
Of course, all of this is my own personal opinion. Where I mention how other
Grex staffers feel, this is just my impression of how they feel, and it's
entirely possible that they in fact feel differently and I've misread them.
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scg
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response 102 of 115:
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Aug 1 06:38 UTC 1995 |
The thing I don't get about this is sidhe's continuing claims that there were
people willing to help, who were intimidated by the criticism of the idea.
Where are all these intimidated people? I'd be more imressed by claims like
that if sidhe would provide some names with his claims, and even more
impressed if those people would speak up themselves. Until then, I'll assume
that these intimidated people don't exist, and that it was just a case of
nobody who knew how to do it thinking it was worth their time to do it.
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scott
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response 103 of 115:
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Aug 4 19:44 UTC 1995 |
Isn't ryan1 or somebody writing their own version of party, to run out of
their own home directory? It would certanly be an example of having their
way, as opposed to what staff wants. Nobody has said that it wouldn't be
allowed, just that it wouldn't be supported (in other words, you're on your
own to write it and keep it running).
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popcorn
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response 104 of 115:
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Aug 5 12:11 UTC 1995 |
Ryan wrote his own bbs, too.
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scg
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response 105 of 115:
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Aug 8 04:16 UTC 1995 |
Ryan is also working on a mailer now. What I've seen of it so far looks quite
nice.
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curby
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response 106 of 115:
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Aug 13 10:37 UTC 1995 |
Quick aside:
Do all Staffers get all the staff mail? Including all the daily
todo stuff (ie delete accounts, change passwords, et al.)? If so,
Why? Wouldn't it be easier to have a ``trouble'' account where
messages like that could get cued up, then, as people had the chance,
they could enter that account and process the mail? It would be really
simple to create the account, and the aliases. And it would allow you
to create a simple accounting process to track who deals with what
problems.
IMHO, that would be preferable then seeing all the work related
messages in my personal account...
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robh
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response 107 of 115:
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Aug 13 11:45 UTC 1995 |
All staffers do indeed get all mail sent to staff. I don't know
if there's an easier way to do it, but I'd assume not, or our
wonderful staff people would have done it already.
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popcorn
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response 108 of 115:
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Aug 13 11:48 UTC 1995 |
What you say makes sense, and I've thought about it at times. But I
think there are some advantages to the way it works now (where all staffers
receive all the staff mail), including:
* emergency mail is seen quickly
* staffers can check one another's answers
* it keeps staffers up to date about what's happening on the system
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curby
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response 109 of 115:
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Aug 13 13:11 UTC 1995 |
It is difficult to decide what is `day-to-day' business and what is
`emergency' business. And I am sure that the staff mail has grown
exponentially since the internet link. So it mihgt be something to
consider in the future, but... Y'all know best what is good for ya!
<grin>
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popcorn
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response 110 of 115:
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Aug 13 15:06 UTC 1995 |
(#107 slipped in, and Picospan didn't say so.)
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mju
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response 111 of 115:
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Aug 15 18:27 UTC 1995 |
Some staffers also have mail-filtering set up, so that their Grex-related mail
is not mixed in with their personal mail.
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steve
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response 112 of 115:
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Aug 19 17:06 UTC 1995 |
I've come to the conclusion that staff people seeing all the mail
is a good thing, if they can stand it. Even though I don't help out
with passwords much, its really useful at times to know about those
things. The other important reason for the overlap is that since
we are all volunteer, sometimes one person winds up covering for
others. If this place had full time staff jobs could be better
assigned becuase we'd know that n was doing this, and y did that.
Unforunately, we don't have FTE's, so we have to improvise.
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srw
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response 113 of 115:
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Aug 19 18:11 UTC 1995 |
What Steve said. It takes practically no time to read and delete
(or just delete) items, compared to the time it takes actually to
handle an item and respond to it. It works pretty well from my POV.
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raven
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response 114 of 115:
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Sep 10 07:20 UTC 1995 |
I for one *appreciate* the time staff puts into keeping Grex
running. I do *not* feel like a havenot as a grex user. I further
believe that it is neccessary for staff to prevent people from trashing
other peoples directories. To the people who are whining is that really
what you want the freedom to hack grex to pieces? To run anonymous on the net
and get grex in legal trouble? To have conferences that can be censored
by the confs fws? It seems like all of those things would either destroy
grex or lessen our freedoms here. I see no red tape, staff always
responds quickly and with infinite paitence to anything I've ever requested.
Furthormore from my knowlodge all problems are discussed (overdiscussed)
in the confs.
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lilmo
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response 115 of 115:
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Sep 16 23:19 UTC 1995 |
I must say that I also have not been treated as an outsider challenging the
"elite" here. I found that when I started making comments (which I didn't
do right away) I others started taking me seriously. Of course, I haven't
asked for much: to be able to log on, to read my mail, and to keep Grex
going, which they do anyways, but I've never found staff unwilling to put
forth the necessary effort to honor those requests, or to answer silly
newbie-questions. Having a strong respect for expertise, I'm sure I have a
slight pro-staff tilt whenever staff is the SUBJECT of a discussion, but I
have also noticed that, quite often, the complaints against staff are rather
nebulous, and dependent upon a supposed pattern of conduct, usually involving
charges of elitism, which rarely, if ever, gets broken down into substantive
examples. Instead, the complainer(s) tend to point to others who feel the
same way as evidence that their complaints are justified. When some staff
member DOES manage to pick out a specific example, or vague reference to one,
s/he tends to have a reasonable explanation, often prefaced by some expression
of regret for the way things turned out.
In short, I also have reread #88, in a vain search for concrete suggestions
for improvement.
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