response 13 of 63:

Jul 13 22:12 UTC 2007

 "Long time buddies" isn't the right way to phrase it, but John is
 right -- our staffing issues are seriously complicated by control
 issues some of the senior staff have.  When they had time in their
 lives to respond quickly to whatever problems arose it didn't matter
 whether they were willing to delegate authority or not.  But now
 they've moved on, but haven't let go, and it's causing problems for
 the system.

 I think the best thing that Grex could do about staff would be to
 thank Steve and Marcus, warmly and sincerely, for years' worth of
 unpaid work that they have selflessly contributed to the system, 
 and then to ask them to retire to advisory-only positions, making
 room for a new generation.

 One HUGE impediment to this is that hardware unreliability problems
 have frequently necessitated intervention from staff who are physically
 local to Ann Arbor.  We need to change that somehow, either by arranging
 a system which allows remote console access or through some other
 mechanism (such as perhaps virtualizing Grex and giving admins the
 ability to relaunch the whole system from a login on the host machine.)

response 15 of 63:

Jul 13 23:14 UTC 2007

Who are you?

response 17 of 63:

Jul 14 00:47 UTC 2007

If you do a !finger on STeve, you will find our home number and while we
screen all calls, we do listen to the messages.  I told STeve about this jerk
and he is looking into it.

response 19 of 63:

Jul 14 04:36 UTC 2007

Who am I?  I'm not sure what kind of a response you're looking for.
I'm not some pseudonym of someone else you know on here or m-net, if
that's what you're wondering.  The name you see at the top of all of
my posts is my real name.  Although I've been registered here for
several years, until recently I've only popped into the bbs on rare
occasions, and rarely said much when I did.

I'm not local to Ann Arbor, but I am in Michigan (Mt. Morris, to be
exact, up by Flint).  I used to do a lot of BBSing in the Flint area
when it was more popular.  I'm no Unix guru or sysadmin or anything,
but I've been running Linux on all of my computers exclusively since
1994.  I've been running Slackware from the beginning, which requires
a bit more knowledge than many of the Linux distros, and is much more
similar to the *BSDs than most of the Linux distros, too.

I also do a little programming (I'm the current maintainer of sc, the
text-based spreadsheet calculator for Unix/Linux) and scripting (mostly
shell, a little perl), so I'm not a complete dummy when it comes to
staff-type activities.  Vim is my editor of choice, and zsh is my shell.
I've also used bash for years.  What else do you want to know?

response 21 of 63:

Jul 14 11:12 UTC 2007

Thanks, Chuck, for volunteering to help out.

response 23 of 63:

Jul 15 01:27 UTC 2007

Joe Gelinas blocked the user 'spin' this morning.  Since 3 o'clock
'pins' has spammed Agora 5 times.

I telephoned and left a message for STeve around 9 tonight, after
talking with Gelinas.  

During the conversation with Gelinas, he brought up the fact that spin
had apparently come in from several different ISPs, and therefore we
could probably not block him that way.  

Any new ideas, other than fix your twit filters?

response 25 of 63:

Jul 15 03:18 UTC 2007

 I'd prefer to see fronttalk and backtalk modified so that the filtering
 system works a little better.  The problem that "spin" ("pins", etc.)
 is exploiting is that even if you twit-filter their response, it's 
 still aggravating to go through the conference because the twit filtering
 occurs after the fact -- i.e. after the conferencing software has decided
 which items to show you as "newresponse" items.

 If that's too much to bite off, then I suggest we try to work on an
 alternative "fixseen" command that will mark as read any items where
 the *only* new comments are from a person identified on your twit list.
 Used in conjunction with existing twit filtering mechanisms such a
 command would take most of the pain out of the "spin" vandalism,
 at least for regular conference readers experienced enough to know
 how to use twit filtering.

response 27 of 63:

Jul 15 04:08 UTC 2007

No.

For one thing, people might have good reasons for doing that
(I can think of one user (no longer active) who used to run a
script which went through agora and downloaded all newresponse
items, then read them off-line, composed responses, and logged
back in with the responses.)

For another, it doesn't really address the problem and is
simple for the vandal to circumvent.  I can write an expect
script in 10 minutes to do what "spin" (etc) is doing, and
furthermore if I set a variable, expect will happily mimic
the typing speed of a real human for me.  You could spend
hours or days writing such a countermeasure and it could
be circumvented in 10 minutes.  And you might break other
(worthwhile) scripts in the process.  

I think it's a flawed approach.

I like my approach (though I'm sure someone can come up with
a better idea) because it improves the functionality of the
conferencing system and gives users additional control over
blocking people they want to block.  I would prefer some sort
of solution that left people the option of still reading
every single response in a conference, however worthless some
of those comments might be.

response 29 of 63:

Jul 15 12:21 UTC 2007

ok, I'd like the board to call an emergency meeting, with two agenda
items:  

1) appoint unicorn to staff
2) discuss appropriate strategies for keeping Grex from being totally
shut down by this twerp.

I'd be glad to host the meeting at my place, if necessary.  Clearly
STeve doesn't have enough time to deal with this; Gelinas and cross are
out of action for the moment, and janc hasn't signed on recently enough
to recognize there is a problem.

Board needs to make a temporary decision about keeping people interested
in reading Agora.


One idea I have is from trapping stalkers with email.  You leave the
email account funtional, and let everyone but the stalker know the new
address.  We could leave Agora functional, but start a new summer agora
that we privately emailed people about.  Then he could spam Agora all he
wanted.  

It doesn't seem that he's actually reading anything, so we might be
under his radar.

response 31 of 63:

Jul 15 13:27 UTC 2007

Also, we'd have to make sure Walter doesn't reset the automatic roll-over
mechanism when he opens the new cf.

response 33 of 63:

Jul 15 13:40 UTC 2007

So all we have to do is get ONE staff member to spend a little time?

response 35 of 63:

Jul 15 14:21 UTC 2007

re: shutting down newuser. Yeah and then we have to hope that this 
user doesnt already have a bunch of accounts created. But that clearly 
seems to be the thing to try. There are tons of proxy servers out 
there and new ones get added all of the time. 

Our staff situation is such that I am willing to take a risk with 
unicorn, even though I dont know him well. He seems like a nice enough 
fellow. 

Another possible temporary solution would be to grant several trusted 
people fw powers in agora so that they could delete any inappropriate 
responses as they get entered. Would that prevent items from showing 
up as new?