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Grex > Coop > #278: Grex Town Hall -- How do we move forward? |  |
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| 25 new of 357 responses total. |
richard
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response 246 of 357:
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Jun 26 18:22 UTC 2010 |
There's also a strong sense of inertia here. For instance people have
been complaining about the validation patch since the day it was put
in, but its all hot air because staff has its feet bolted in place.
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mary
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response 247 of 357:
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Jun 26 22:13 UTC 2010 |
I forget if this is the item in which the question of our resident agent
came up, or not, but... I spoke with Mark Conger today and he'd be fine
with continuing in that role.
I'm looking around at conferencing sites for an online community we
could experiment with. Not places where we'd rent disk space and
install our own software but rather where we'd use existing software on
a hosting service dedicated to such use. Quite a few look fine but tend
to function more like mailing lists than conferences. Google Groups, on
the other hand, threads better and has some nice features. I'm still
playing with it and will come back with a list of pros and cons sometime
within the next. But I thought I'd mention it here so the naysayers
could have a head start. ;-)
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cyklone
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response 248 of 357:
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Jun 26 22:55 UTC 2010 |
Count me out of anything with Google attached to it.
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kentn
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response 249 of 357:
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Jun 26 23:07 UTC 2010 |
Re 247: that may have been one of the Board minutes items, but it
doesn't matter as long as we get the information :) For that, thanks
for talking with Mark and I'm glad he's willing to continue in that
role. There isn't much to do for it, generally, but we do need someone
to take care of the requests that the resident agent gets, like that
once a year corporate update form.
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keesan
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response 250 of 357:
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Jun 27 02:49 UTC 2010 |
Could someone PLEASE tell Mark we have a reel-to-reel tape deck for him.
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tonster
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response 251 of 357:
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Jun 27 04:13 UTC 2010 |
resp:248: why the negative stigma to google?
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cyklone
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response 252 of 357:
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Jun 27 14:21 UTC 2010 |
Because I don't trust their data policies any more than I do with FB.
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slynne
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response 253 of 357:
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Jun 27 14:31 UTC 2010 |
Yeah. One if the things I like about conferencing here is that posts
here don't turn up in search engines. But I am not too worried about
that on whatever web based place we try. I'll probably use a pseudonym
though. I figure you folks can probably handle that.
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mary
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response 254 of 357:
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Jun 27 15:42 UTC 2010 |
That's a good way to go if you don't want your comments to be indexed. As
I'm looking at Google Groups I see it's possible to be just as closed and
locked-down as the current Grex but also make more open choices. If this
is going to be truly an experiment I sure hope we take a different
approach and try to be more open.
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marcvh
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response 255 of 357:
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Jun 27 16:10 UTC 2010 |
That's certainly one candidate for a focus of the system -- catering to
people who have some reason they'd prefer to avoid the mainstream Web
2.0 services like keesan and cyclone. I have no idea how you would
market to them though.
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bellstar
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response 256 of 357:
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Jun 27 17:27 UTC 2010 |
> [...] the mainstream Web 2.0 services like keesan and cyclone.
I don't mean to be rude but that made me smile... broadly.
By the way, I'd rather classify "Web 2.0 services" as sewerstream. It's a pity
the strongest currents on the web, and on the Internet, consist mainly of
domestic sewage even though I do take pride in contributing my fair share of
alimentary canal status reports.
Oh, and Grex needs a topic--users will follow. It seems to have lost its
function as a regional hub and after that loss it hasn't picked up any
specific role beyond being a low-impact discussion place (which is nice, by
me; I learnt quite a few things on here that would've been a lot less easily
learnt on a place with higher impact and broader participation of random
people).
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kentn
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response 257 of 357:
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Jun 27 19:36 UTC 2010 |
Re 244 and newuser is impossible to use: Yes, it's difficult to wade
through, especially for first-time users with no commandline/shell
experience. I wonder if we had more web-based services (chat, bbs,
email) if there could be a simplified newuser for people who have no
desire to set up a shell account so that they can use the web for
conferencing?
This would lock people out of a commandline/shell, presumably, or else
give them some automatic defaults for a shell they'll never use. If
they do at some future point desire to use that shell, they might want
to redo some of the settings (and that might lead to another program to
help with that along the lines of the historic newuser program).
Another thing that would be interesting, at least, would be a way for
people to quit newuser before finishing (I've done it but it was a lot
of interrupts, etc. before it finally decided to stop) and tally the
number of people who do that. I suspect we'd see plenty of people who
opt out before finishing vs those who actually do get through the setup.
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cyklone
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response 258 of 357:
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Jun 27 21:25 UTC 2010 |
Re #253-255: My views are colored somewhat by the recent mnet incident
involving an Iranian user (not bellstar, to the best of my knowledge)
who became fearful after learning someone had messed with mnet in a way
that made his posts or files web-searchable.
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richard
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response 259 of 357:
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Jun 27 23:22 UTC 2010 |
re #258 how by hacking mnet? all this guy has to do is not post using
his real name. no big deal.
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cyklone
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response 260 of 357:
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Jun 27 23:33 UTC 2010 |
Take it up with mnet's BOD. I wasn't in on the discussions or the hack.
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kentn
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response 261 of 357:
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Jun 27 23:42 UTC 2010 |
One user put some code on his m-net web page that acted as a gateway to
the conferencing system, so via that link and a browser you could see
the conferences from outside m-net. Search engines apparently picked up
this 2nd hand content. This was discussed in the m-net conferences.
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bellstar
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response 262 of 357:
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Jun 28 01:12 UTC 2010 |
Re #258:
On M-Net I'm klokster and, incidetally, I made a comment there about how
M-Net's security is better than Grex's. As everybody should by now know
systems can be proofed against folly but not against active stupidity (the
original dictum says this about malice). I always keep that in mind.
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tod
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response 263 of 357:
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Jun 28 04:35 UTC 2010 |
re #262
Agree
I also made comment similar
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richard
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response 264 of 357:
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Jun 28 17:49 UTC 2010 |
How specifically is mnet's security better than grex's?
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tonster
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response 265 of 357:
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Jun 28 17:54 UTC 2010 |
resp:259: It wasn't a hack at all, and could be done even more easily on
grex, if he so chose.
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krj
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response 266 of 357:
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Jun 28 18:11 UTC 2010 |
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krj
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response 267 of 357:
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Jun 28 18:12 UTC 2010 |
(oops, tried to deleted my response before posting it)
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tod
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response 268 of 357:
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Jun 28 18:41 UTC 2010 |
re #264
Fiscally for starters..
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kentn
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response 269 of 357:
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Jun 28 19:31 UTC 2010 |
But not necessarily system-wise as we've shown when we turn off the
restricted shell. But with the restricted shell, we seem to have helped
our security some albeit at the expense of general membership.
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bellstar
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response 270 of 357:
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Jun 28 21:37 UTC 2010 |
Re #264:
The web frontend to M-Net's conferences is hidden behind authentication (and
served over HTTPS). It requires active effort (or active stupidity) to get
crawled. All's needed for Grex's forums to get crawled is one hyperlink on
a third party site, which is neither active effort on part of the crawler nor
active stupidity on part of a user. After all, if you have your stuff out in
the open you're inviting people to link and to explore.
The reason Grex conferences don't appear in Google results is that Google
respects the 'robots.txt' convention. The same is not true of someone who
programs a robot to harvest email addresses or any other useful information,
say (using a Vim regex) /[Ii] \(have \)*work\(ed\)* at \(.*\)/. (Not that
there is much of valuable information on here.)
P.S. Poor tod has some unfriendly stalkers in Spokane. I wonder how come they
still haven't found this place. His presence here is very easy to find, as
is the presence anybody who ever participated in Grex BoD meetings. In this
case M-Net's worse than Grex thanks to one 'yuno.'
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