response 23 of 87:

Apr 28 22:57 UTC 2017

If you are validated, of course.  If not your are stuck in a restricted
shell (resh).

response 25 of 87:

May 4 13:06 UTC 2017

Also, green koopas will walk off a cliff, but red koopas are smarter and will
not walk off a cliff. Beware of blue koopas, as they walk faster.

response 27 of 87:

Sep 10 13:13 UTC 2017

Hmm..still having weird experiences listing new items in bbs cf's...

response 29 of 87:

Oct 11 22:03 UTC 2017

Be productive
Be  Compliance
Be   All that you can be

response 31 of 87:

Oct 12 23:51 UTC 2017

Wallet chain...bum a smoke...another quarter on the Defender screen
"I'm up next"

response 33 of 87:

Mar 6 04:38 UTC 2018

The people that actively participate are warm and friendly, but most of that
is in 'party' and on gopher I believe. There are really only one or two sour
grapes here in bbs... and really only a handful of active users period. What
grex really needs are more people who are willing to participate.

response 35 of 87:

Mar 6 18:47 UTC 2018

I go with the "warm atmosphere" sentiments; Grex is indeed quite a cosy place
to hang out, and a warm friendly bunch of people to hang out with. The 'party'
comms program is a good place to meet other Grexers, even if they are not
online at the same time. The Grex gopher server, has not long been back online
, after 'quite' a few years (how many years now?) and is a great addition to
the gopher universe: well worth a visit, or adding your own gopher page to
the server (some tutorials in user: papa, and tfurrows, gopher holes, to help
create your own gopher hole and join in :) ).
More people would be nice. 

response 41 of 87:

Mar 14 04:19 UTC 2018

Also, I'm not sure being found or doing web stuff is really what grex needs.
I think what grex needs is what's happening right here- user participation.
Grex needs more people like you, who are willing to dive in and try bbs,
gboard, and party. The more that is going on, the more those who stumble in
will enjoy or appreciate, the more they'll stick around, and the more they'll
invite others. I think :)

response 43 of 87:

Mar 14 14:34 UTC 2018

Advertising?  Go for it.

Hmm.  There are a lot of questions in your posts, and I'm afraid
I'm swamped at work at the moment so can't give them all adequate
answers, but I'll try and write some words right now just to put
something down.

What happened to Grex?  Basically, Grex's fundamental problem (as
I see it) is that it tried to retain a local focus for far too
long.  Grex started up as a dial-in BBS, believe it or not:
granted, the "BBS" part was a program called Picospan that ran on
a Sun computer running Unix (basically 4.2BSD + some 4.3
enhancements) but it was a dialup BBS none the less.  As such, the
majority of users were from the immediate geographical region
around the physical system (Ann Arbor, Michigan in the US) for the
first couple of formative years.  Eventually the system got
connected to the Internet, but it was never able to fully shake
off the local flavor of the thing and embrace being a world-wide
Internet resource.  Contrast this to SDF, which *did* make that
transition successfully.

Why isn't Grex on the web?  Grex is on the web.  The web site is
probably kind of broken (no one is curating the content anymore)
but it's been running a web server since something like 1994.  You
can create a `www` directory in your home directory and put HTML
files in there (or any other content type, I guess...).  As long
as your content doesn't violate any laws or anything, no one will
stop you.  I don't think anyone here hates the web, nor is "grex"
as some kind of monolithic entity trying to push gopher; some Grex
users are interested in Gopher and we put up a gopher server for
them to play around with.  If you want to do a web thing, though,
then go for it.

That said, Grex had some pretty draconian policies based around
what one might describe as a culture of fear in the early 90s.  It
seems that the staff at that time did much hand-wringing around
the possibility of hordes of unwashed Internet newbies overrunning
Grex and swamping it with lots of bots, script-kiddy attack
scripts, and using it as a vehicle to send spam and host porn.  To
be fair, there was a period when that was more or less precisely
what was happening, but this air of general caution was paired
with an excessively baroque decision making process based on hippy
ideals of consensus and trust in the fundamental good intentions
of the users (this was much easier when everyone calling into the
system lived just down the road; much harder when the majority of
users are anonymous figures on a vast and nebulous Internet).  So
instead of, for example, putting some simple roadblocks onto new
users and requiring them to provide some minimal verification of
who they are and what they might use Grex for but otherwise give
them interesting and useful tools, users were let onto the system
but then the system itself was locked down in such a way that it
wasn't interesting for anything more than the BBS and party.

Anyway, the effect of all of the above was to halt forward
progress at some point, particularly as we started getting abusive
users who would login, trash the system, get kicked off and then
just come back and create a new account and do it again.  By the
time anyone realized what was happening, most of the userbase had
mostly moved on and Grex was left as a lonely backwater.  For
example, the prohibition against images on Grex's web pages was
because there was great fear that Grex would be overrun by amateur
porn producers hawking their nefarious wares; the users voted and
decided to prevent hosting images as a result.  Yay us.

We've tried to fix some of that in the past few years, but the
decay is large and time is limited.

Who is Grex trying to attract?  I think part of the problem is
that we haven't actively tried to attract *anyone*.  Personally
I'd like to see a kind of online hacker-space in the same vein as
hashbang.sh, but I don't know if there's a lot of interest in such
a thing and just getting anyone on board would be cool.  I think
there is some notion that Grex, in its present form, will mostly
appeal to the technically oriented.

response 45 of 87:

Mar 14 15:27 UTC 2018

Sure. Feel free to enter an item for brainstorming.

As for what Grex is, it's modest: it's an i386 virtual machine running
OpenBSD; it's hosted on a virtual machine running on hardware in a
staffer's basement. This works OK, but is problematic for some things.

I wanted to move to FreeBSD on a mulitcore server machine with more
RAM and an excessive amount of storage space; the server I sent died.
No idea what happened to it. Oh well. At least we're not on SPARC
anymore.