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Grex > Coop9 > #27: Motion: To allow anonymous reading via Backtalk | |
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| 25 new of 624 responses total. |
rcurl
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response 210 of 624:
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Jan 4 04:10 UTC 1997 |
Re #194: Jan, I think the experiment tests for exactly what we need to
determine - whether there are problems, personal or practical. A lot of
good reasons have been put forward for open anonymous web reading, both
practical and personal, and likewise good reasons against, both personal
and practical, have been tendered. The solution is to test both systems
and thereby determine which personal and practical reasons seem most vital
to follow. I am sure that if we already had anonymous web reading, and it
was proposed to close it, there would be users that would find that
personally objectionable.
I think I may be proposing this experiment because I don't make absolute
prior decisions based solely on my feelings, and am always willing to
experiment to determine whether my feelings are what I think they are -
whether I judged my feelings correctly.
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ladymoon
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response 211 of 624:
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Jan 4 08:25 UTC 1997 |
Fine Rane- we have already given you a way to test it- OPEN AGORA AND
INTRO- and whatever the hell Valerie wants to do with her conferences, so
long as the users don't mind. That should be sufficient for your little
fun and games. There is no reason to do more than that for sake of
experimentation, and even that leaves a load to be desired.
And one last thing- Kerouac- if you EVER screw with linking items out of
Sexuality II without AT LEAST the poster's say-so, you will be sorry. Mark
those words.
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phenix
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response 212 of 624:
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Jan 4 10:16 UTC 1997 |
time: too damn early
date: uhh, sometime
subject: uhh, this back talk thing
MY .02$ (Two cents)
ok, my two cents is that i'm in favor of keeping things how they are.
but i'm nto really into anything.
but i'm nto a member, but i feel i should speak out.
what i've noticed in the past..ohh...2 years or so is the increasing amount
of the generall billegerance level of grex.
from freekman to babalita to the problem wabbits, it's just a generall problem
the main thing i see inthis discussion is senseless backbiting, rampent
bias and hatred, and a little ego/testosterone trips.
btw, sincei really did read everthing, i have to agree with janc(i think)
who said it's community, and marcus and say that i dont' favor it.
but i do see MANY symptoms of a problem for a real community in this item
but, like i said, i'm not a member yet, and i don't care.
err, my vote doesn't count, though i find it disturbing that people don't like
the "observe" idea..<shudder> too much william gibson and orson wells
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ryan1
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response 213 of 624:
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Jan 4 14:53 UTC 1997 |
Kerouac, I seriously don't know what the hell you are talking about.
I've never seen such backwards logic. Not to mention that it would be
too much work to set up an entire new way for non members of grex to
read only the "zero" items. It has already been stated that the source
for picospan is not available.
Jan said this previously, and it is so true, that I will repeat it.
Why should we tick off some of our current users so that we could easily
attract more users?
There are pleantly of others ways people can find out about Grex. In my
opinion, Grex is pretty much overloaded with users. All of Grex's ptys
are often used up, and Grex is extrememly slow at times. I am not
saying this to be negative toward future Grexers, however I'm just being
realistic. But if Grex is already close to overloaded now, what would
25 "non members" downloading BBS items at once effect Grex's internet
link? (and cpu) These "non members" would be reading these items, with
no chance to reply to them, so they really would not be contributing to
Grex.
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chelsea
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response 214 of 624:
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Jan 4 15:25 UTC 1997 |
Everything we do will always tick-off someone. Everything.
I really don't think it's sound policy to base policy on
who will be ticked-off. Policy should be consistent with
Grex's stated goals.
Jan, somewhere back there, as a way of suggesting how a compromise
might be the ticket here, you said you hadn't yet heard of any
good reasons for allowing anonymous (not having run newuser)
conference reading. I'm going to suggest you are maybe so
eager to be a negotiator here that you have mostly stopped
reading what is being said. Negotiating is fine but not
at the expense of sound and *consistent* policy.
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kerouac
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response 215 of 624:
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Jan 4 15:46 UTC 1997 |
Okay, maybe rcurl is right, maybe we need to try anonymous access. Why
not simply stipulate that the one requirement for a conf to be offered
through the Backtalk interface is unrestricted access, and that if an fw
decides or the users of the conf decide that they arent comfortable with
that, dont offer that particular conf through Backtalk at all. In any
fashion. The Board should vote that the one and only requirement for a
conf to be offered through Backtalk is unrestricted access, and that Grex
will not offer restricted confs via the web.
Then we can let Jan, as backtalk admin, deal with the
upset fw's and he can remove the objecting one's confs altogether from
Backtalk.
A disclaimer can be put up saying that web access of grex confs is subject
to the permissions of the fw's and/or users of each conference. If there
is some great clamor for a particular conf to be offered through Backtalk,
the fws will hear about it soon enough.
This would be more consistent than offering all the confs via backtalk and
censoring some and not others. The product Grex offers via the Web would
be consistent, even if slightly different from what you get through
picospan.
(and Selena, re: #14, you and Brighn on several occasions linked items of
mine out of their intends confs without asking. So dont be hypocritical.
And I wouldnt be linking mostly, I'd be entering new items under my own
name and copying stuff over. But I dont think its going to come to that
because the majority sentiment is clearly in favor of at least trying some
version of open access. will be an interesting vote though!)
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chelsea
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response 216 of 624:
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Jan 4 15:49 UTC 1997 |
Addendum to that last paragraph: I went back and read Jan's comments (in
#203) and see he isn't supporting a compromise at this point. Instead, he
is suggesting nothing change so as to not offend the users who are
threatening to leave and the Board member who has given notice he will
stop down from his elected office and others who may not like this
proposed change but who maybe aren't aware of it or are speaking up.
We are setting sticky precedent here. Your stand doesn't have to
coordinate with Grex's mission you just have to look weepy and wounded to
the core and support will follow. Sorry, I'd rather lose a Board member
and go for easier access and a chance for more diversity. It's not even a
close call.
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orinoco
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response 217 of 624:
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Jan 4 16:47 UTC 1997 |
I have to agree with Chelsea there. Going with a compromise just
because those against anonymous reading have been complaining louder
and acting more hurt is probably a bad idea. But, there *are* good
reasons for going with a compromise, as I now realize.
Even though it makes no *technical* difference whether anonymous
reading of a conference is allowed, it could well change the attitude
of that conference's users. For example, even though anyone could
wander into the poetry conference or the recovery conference in
observer mode with complete anonymity, those conferences do have an
atmosphere of community. I have occasionally posted in (I don't
remember if it was poetry or writing, one of the two), and found the
atmosphere to be like sharing one's poetry with friends, rather than
like standing on the diag shouting it at strangers.
It seems to me, from what I have heard, that the poetry conference
wants to keep that atmosphere--and I don't blame them. I am much more
comfortable sharing with friends, even though there may well be
eavesdroppers present, than I am shouting at strangers, even though
there may be friends present.
I realize that the idea that Websurfers are more impersonal, more
anonymous, than Netsurfers is not true, but just the fact that that
idea is so common is a good reason to disallow anonymous reading of
some conferences. Take the recovery conference, for example. In a
conference of that sort, it is essential for people to feel comfortable
talking to each other. If putting that conference out on the web would
make the users feel uncomfortable talking, then it would be hurting the
conference.
There are, though, some conferences where this is not an issue. As a
farwitness of thezone, I see no problem with putting that up for
anonymous reading. Many conferences are not about things as personal
as those discussed in recovery, or even poetry, and the discomfort
level of knowing Websurfers could read your responses would (imho) be
much lower. This is why I think putting conferences up for anonymous
reading on a per-conference basis is the best idea.
And maybe I'm wrong--maybe users of every conference would be
uncomfortable with anonymous reading. In that case, what harm is done?
All that happens is that all the conferences individually choose to
disallow anonymous reading, and we are no worse off than we are now.
We would stand next to nothing to lose, and a lot to gain, by letting
individual conferences decide. (Thank you to jenna for explaining this
side of the issue to me)
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kerouac
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response 218 of 624:
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Jan 4 17:13 UTC 1997 |
I think one reason for the objection to anonymous reading lies in the seeming
fact that some users think that when they post writings to grex, they retain
intellectual and all other rights to said writings. In fact, unless
something is copyrighted, when it is posted to Grex, it has been given away
and is in Grex's domain. Grex may choose to let authors of items retain
the rights to freeze or delete them, but that in no way says that Grex
at anytime relinquishes its technical proprietorship of the material. When
the material is posted to grex, it becomes grex's property and grex
can retransmit the material in any fashion deemed appopriate.
There should be a disclaimer somewhere that spells this out, so that if
someone who posted a poem two years ago in Poetry suddenly finds it out on
the web, they dont try to sue Grex. In fact, in the absence of such a
disclaimer, maybe it would be safer to say that if we go to anonymous
reading, confs wishing to be part of that need to be re-started so that no
old items could be accessed. If any former user can make the claim that
poems grex is offering suddenly anonymously are their intellectual
property, because it was never spelled out that they werent, Grex would be
vulnerable legally I think.
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janc
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response 219 of 624:
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Jan 4 17:22 UTC 1997 |
I'm not unwilling to offend people, and I know that some people will be
offended by *any* change. But I need to have a compelling reason to think
that this will make the system better for future users before I'm willing to
offend current users. We have arguments on both sides for what effect this
will have on future users. Some say it will make it easier for people to get
involved in conferencing. Others (Marcus for one) say that putting people
into a read-only environment makes it *harder* for them to get really involved
in conferencing. I thought I'd been reading this item pretty carefully, if
you've seen a compelling case for why Grex *needs* to be readable to
unregistered users or would be much improved by that, please explain. I don't
see it.
No, I don't think we should cave into loud-mouths and threats. But we've got
some of those on both sides. Clearly the thing to do is to ignore the threats
but not the feelings and opinions behind them.
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janc
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response 220 of 624:
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Jan 4 17:27 UTC 1997 |
(Richard slipped in with #218. He says "unless something is copyrighted, when
it is posted to Grex...". Well, you automatically have a copyright on
everything you write as soon as you write it, so that should give you a clue
as to how far you should believe the rest of that response. Authors retain
the copyrights of everything posted to Grex. By posting you are implicitly
permitting Grex to reproduce and distribute your work, but you are not giving
up the copyright.)
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kerouac
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response 221 of 624:
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Jan 4 17:29 UTC 1997 |
The compelling reason is that grex's membership base is flat, it is not
growing. The only way to change this is to get Grex's product out to as
many people as possible. You cant get new members without new users.
People who find they can read things anonymously will get a true sense of how
how open Grex is and some will want to get logins, and some of those will
eventually be members. That is pretty compelling ifyou ask me!
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kerouac
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response 222 of 624:
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Jan 4 18:02 UTC 1997 |
#220, ah but by permitting "Grex" to reproduce and distribute your work,
you are permitting everyone who reads grex and is a part of grex that
priviledge. Anyone in cyberspace who comes to grex has complete rights to
reproduce and distribute what they read here, because grex has been implicitly
given that right and by making materials available, has implicitly shared
that right.
You shareyour copyright not just with this board but with everyone who
reads this board. You give up exclusivity.
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scott
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response 223 of 624:
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Jan 4 19:17 UTC 1997 |
So if you sell one book, you lose all rights to any further copying. I really
doubt that.
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valerie
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response 224 of 624:
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Jan 4 19:22 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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rcurl
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response 225 of 624:
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Jan 4 19:52 UTC 1997 |
Re #217: I am still perplexed how an "atmosphere of community" will be
affected at all by anonymous web reading when it isn't by anonymous user
or observer reading. Besides, the great likilyhood is that few or no more
persons will read most conferences (more than once...).
I'm a fw in a few conferences where I am sure the participants would
welcome more participation, and more exposure is one way to get more
participation.
I am going to enter enquiries in those cfs to see if there are any
objections. and to invite readers there to come here to enter their
comments on the issue.
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mta
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response 226 of 624:
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Jan 4 20:40 UTC 1997 |
Two issues where I see GREX being better off if we allow (at least some) web
access reading are
a) More staff time freed up for making GREX a btter place by reducing
the number of once only logins that need to be reaped. People will
have the chance to browse one or two conferences and see if GREX
is the kind of place they're looking for. If not, then they'll
never create that once use login and the staff won't have to spend
time deleting it.
b) Folks who have no idea that GREX exists or what computer
conferencing is all about will have a better chance to "stumble
upon" GREX and see for themselves. As Mary says, this could
open GREX up to a whole new group of people and do wonderful
things for the diversity that makes GREX so much fun.
c) (I just thought of a third) People who are being drawn here now
for the most part being drawn by the prospects of free mail, or
party, or ... anything but conferencing. But the conferences are
the heart of what GREX is. They are not only the source of most
GREX memberships, which are what allow e-mail and party to be
offered at all, but they are the long range, timeless conversations
define our community and allow us to compare and contrast our ideas
with people over time and across space. People we may well never
meet directly. OPening up web reading access will open up a
reference point that will bring people directly to the conferences
and put them on an even footing with e-mail and party as GREX destinations.
,
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valerie
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response 227 of 624:
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Jan 4 20:51 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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kerouac
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response 228 of 624:
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Jan 4 21:35 UTC 1997 |
When the board was about to vote on this matter, it was tabled
because Valerie wanted a member vote. Since Valerie apparently
has rescinded her request for such a vote, it would seem that
the matter of anonymous reads is back where it started and the
Board should take it up and decide the matter at the next
meeting. Obviously anyone who doesnt like the board's decision
can then ask for a member vote. Put it back on the agenda.
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jenna
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response 229 of 624:
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Jan 5 02:51 UTC 1997 |
Actually, I've spoken to a lawyer who deals speciofically in
copyright law (during a creative writing seminar) who said
that the place of publication only has the right to distrubute
the material you've given them permission to distribute to the
same places as originally specified. Mainly this is because
national and international copyrioght laws are differnt and to be
nationally copywriteen something need not be internationally
copyrighten, however it also applies here.
--
Really, if you guys WANT to start opening everything to the web,
sincerely really want to, that's fine. Just restart every conference
first and don't expect to see my name in the future.
-I'm against it, still, for all the community reasons.
KEROUAC> if not responding in poetry doesn't mean agreement with the
majority,wouldn't not responding in CVOOP mean the same thing, and
thus might there not be more people who want to conferences to stya
on grex alone? *if that even is the majority opionion, I've lost track*
As for Experimentation> You're experimentatio, if it involves all
the conferences wioll do just what either MDW or Janc (I think it
wasone of the them) said back ther.e It will make the people who
feel uncomftoable even more uncomfotable. And it will send me runnningTest
groups are usually smaller than the whole group, aren't they?
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mdw
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response 230 of 624:
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Jan 5 03:43 UTC 1997 |
[ I am relieved to hear that Rob H. is unlikely to take Grex hostage, or
to spam kerouac. ]
As matters presently stand, the only thing that stops new people from
responding is fear of the "r" key. That *is* a barrier, but not a huge
one. Valerie's statistics suggest that most people either overcome the
barrier, or stop visiting. (To detect permament lurkers, you'd need to
measure how *often* the current participants respond, and how long ago.
A significant # of people don't respond very often, & some leave as
others join...)
With "anonymous web browsing", the "respond" barrier becomes much
larger, because the "newuser brush" barrier has been moved. Jan argues
that the resulting larger # of people crossing the "read" barrier will
more than make up for the increased height of the "respond" barrier. I
think it's very possible that it could work out the other way. Firstly,
it *does* seem that there is a "goldfish" bowl to take into effect -
some of our most scintillating current contributors might leave, thus
decreasing the overall attractiveness of the system. Secondly, we
*know* the "newuser brush" barrier is a significant barrier - one many
of those web people won't overcome. Selena here makes an excellent
illustration of the cusp of the "newuser brush" barrier - if we were
only *slightly* more picky about identities she would not be here at
all. Thirdly, as Ryan points out in #213, there is the system load
factor to take into account. We only have a limited # of CPU cycles &
network bandwidth to spend on people who *might* overcome the "respond"
barrier and become full-fledged respondents. Even if a larger # of
people overcome the "read" barrier, if a smaller % of those people are
capable of overcoming the "newuser brush" barrier, then the net result
is a smaller # of new respondents. If the "read" barrier shrinks too
much, it's possible that the resulting tidal wave of transient web
surfers could so totally overwhelm system resources as to scare away
some formerly permament participants. (Imagine what would happen if one
of the web search engines indexes grex.)
Mary, Rane, & others are essentially arguing that we need "more
diversity", and that any form of participation, even anonymous web
browsing, is "good". Actually, however, we know that's not true. For
instance, we know that party is very popular, and even that some % of
party goers become regular conference respondents, and yet here in coop,
the tendency is definitely to think of party as a sort of "cinderella"
form of computer conferencing. There are certainly also plenty of
people here who have been in the past, at one point or another, been
concerned about the "problems" of "unbridled" growth. I certainly
haven't seen *any* serious proposal to put a mud on grex, even though we
all know that would *certainly* be one of the surest ways to increase
growth on the system. I think it is fair to say that no matter how much
we might *say* that we value "diversity", that there are still some
kinds of "diversity" that are more equal than others, and that perhaps
this is one of those "mushy PC" terms we might want to avoid, because it
is so overloaded with multiple emotional meanings.
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janc
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response 231 of 624:
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Jan 5 04:56 UTC 1997 |
I don't think the arguments Marcus attributes to "Jan" are mine.
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rcurl
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response 232 of 624:
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Jan 5 06:28 UTC 1997 |
I pause to visualize bagheads wielding the newuser brush.....
Jenna, you can not *know* that any of your concerns will happen. If any
did, and the consensus is that they are serious, anonymous web access can
be closed immediately.
The same goes for Marcus' (convoluted) discussion. He can not *know* that
any of the things he speculates about will happen. He also raises
strawpeople: muds are not conferencing; party is probably a minor source
of conferencers (I recall that was studied once, and found to be the
case).
Like others here, I refuse to be intimidated by the threats of users to
leave. I think some making threats are fine conferencers, but I will not
abide threats. This is a *democratic* society, and decisions should be
made by *democratic* processes, and not influenced by what amounts to
threatened terrorism, self immolation, or any of the other tools of those
that do not, apparently, believe in democracy and an open society.
Nevertheless, I do listen to rational discussion. I can believe that not
all conferences are the same. One, staff, is not open to users, members or
not, unless they have been anointed staff. Perhaps an argument can be
made (but has not been made) that others should not be open to *nonusers*
(i.e., those without accounts). I don't know of any, but I do not visit
those few that have been mentioned in this context.
I would like to ask those that think that there are conferences that
should not be open to *nonusers* to make their case for each. No one has
attempted this yet. If such cases can be made, there would be a basis for
the suggested compromise of opening some and not others.
The question of system load is a completely separate matter. Could we have
some numbers on this? By how much would we expect the load average to
increase for so many web readers reading? We don't appear to want to do
anything about the contribution to load of e-mail - why web reading? Which
leads me to ask - can the number of simultaneous anonymous web readers be
limited, separately from web conferencers with accounts?
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mdw
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response 233 of 624:
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Jan 5 08:59 UTC 1997 |
I claimed "Jan argues that the resulting larger # of people crossing the
"read" barrier will more than make up for the increased height of the
"respond" barrier." Actually Jan (in #203) said "- some wholely
theoretical set of people who were previously too timid to fill out a
newuser form, will get on, observe for a while, and then register to
become full participants." It would be more accurate to say that
Valerie (#184) & Mary (#187) [& very probably others] are making this
argument, and that Jan is expressing skepticism ("theoretical")
regarding this possibility. I apologize for stuffing words into Jan's
mouth.
Obviously I can't *know* for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt. All I
can do is argue based on 17 years of experience with computer
conferencing and other forms of computer aided communications, including
a fairly wide range of entrance barriers and user interfaces, and 15
years worth of actual hands on design experience. It is of course
entirely up to you if you consider my experience as "worth anything" or
not.
Technically speaking, party *in and of itself* is a form of computer
conferencing. (Technically, it's a form of "synchronous group"
communications, as opposed to PicoSpan which is "asynchronous".) It is
of course used here mainly for frivolous purposes, but there are
applications in which it could be used for a serious purpose, and
indeed, there are actual computer conferencing implementations out there
that are mainly designed around "synchronous" use. So Rane is already
guilty of a pretty glaring value judgement in making the assumption that
party is not a form of computer conferencing. If one is willing to
discount "party" because of its ephemeral and mostly social use, then
how much of a step is it to start deciding that agora or test should not
be here because of its ephemeral and mostly social use? Perhaps "write"
and "talk" (two other synchronous tools) shouldn't be here? Or, if you
agree that party, talk, mail, and picospan all belong here, on what
basis do you decide how much of our limited resources to give to each?
[ Every mud I've heard of includes at least a "note board" which players
can leave notes for each other. Different muds have different
characteristics, but nearly all have *some* social element, and I've
heard of some that are pretty much devoted to non-competitive "social"
uses. Frankly, I don't see much difference between those muds, and
some of the literate conferences I've seen (such as hbk5:muse) or
party, for that matter. ]
Rane asks regarding "system load of web conferencing. HTTP is not very
amenable to any sort of load throttling. HTTP has no real concept of a
"session", so it's actually quite complicated to count active users, or
to detect when they go away. Each URL that is fetched by a client
"comes out of nowhere" so far as the server is concerned, and is
supposed to be serviced "instantaneously". The only two ways a server
might throttle load would either be to service some requests more
slowly, or to "arbitrarily" reject some requests. Many web users come
from long distances via slow lines. It would be difficult to program in
a meaningful amount of extra slowness in performance, that would either
help reduce system resource usage, or even be noticeable over such a
link. Throwing some requests out is even worse - it just looks like a
broken web server to users - surely not the face we'd like to present to
users. So the only effective throttle we have on the web is what we
have right now - the overall capacity of the internet link, with a
limited amount of discrimination for telnet sessions and against web
sessions, coupled with an aggressive policy of discouraging .gif's &
.jpg's, or any other really large file.
Rane also asserts it would be "easy" to just turn it off. That's not
necessarily true. If (for instance) a web engine managed to index our
conferences (and that is, after all, a reasonable thing for us to
*want*, is it not?) then it is very probable that some of the resulting
items could become *very* popular. Our current internet link is
certainly *not* up to that kind of load, and we could end up having to
change our DNS name and pointing the old URL to outer space to get rid
of the unwanted hits. A web engine is sort of a "worst" instant
disaster, but a more realistic disaster, say, an exponential growth in
web browsers "discovering" grex, could result in the same problem.
(Basically, this is Steve Andre's "the continent of India decides to all
use Grex" disaster.)
Someone up above pointed out that in PicoSpan, all of the responses are
stored in one file, and started a thread to solve this "problem". In
fact, it's completely irrelevant. It would be silly to export the naked
PicoSpan item file, because a web browser won't be able to do anything
terribly nice with it anyways. Instead, one would write a cgi binary to
parse out the item file format, and produce a text/html stream with
nicely formatted responses in it. There's no reason the cgi binary
can't just stop after response 0, and that's all that would be needed to
implement the proposed "item text only" restriction. Even though it
would be technically easy, it's a silly idea. It doesn't fix the
"goldfish bowl" problem, it's certainly not going to do a good job of
introducing people to "discussions on grex", and in short, it just plain
doesn't make sense.
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popcorn
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response 234 of 624:
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Jan 5 16:38 UTC 1997 |
Marcus, so you're saying that having lots more people reading the conferences
would be a disaster? I don't get it.
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