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| Author |
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| 25 new of 87 responses total. |
ryan
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response 25 of 87:
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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.
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tod
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response 26 of 87:
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May 4 23:40 UTC 2017 |
This shell was made to order. That's why it fits me so well.
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tod
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response 27 of 87:
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Sep 10 13:13 UTC 2017 |
Hmm..still having weird experiences listing new items in bbs cf's...
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walkman
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response 28 of 87:
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Oct 10 16:27 UTC 2017 |
The system is trying to trick you into thinking it is vibrant and useful
with new posts. People are interested in Grex!
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tod
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response 29 of 87:
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Oct 11 22:03 UTC 2017 |
Be productive
Be Compliance
Be All that you can be
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walkman
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response 30 of 87:
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Oct 12 13:17 UTC 2017 |
Grex is wearing parachute pants and a Frankie Goes to Hollywood shirt.
Holding an ice cream while checking the Casio watch. Humming "It's a
Sin" by Pet Shop boys in the mall. They are showing Preadator in the
cinema in 20 minutes. Play some defender when the ice cream is gone to
burn some time. Compliance and productivity is the mantra of mall rat
Grex.
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tod
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response 31 of 87:
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Oct 12 23:51 UTC 2017 |
Wallet chain...bum a smoke...another quarter on the Defender screen
"I'm up next"
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swolf154
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response 32 of 87:
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Mar 6 02:44 UTC 2018 |
Wow...Such a Warm atmosphere here? Grex must have Hundreds of new users
waiting to be validated.
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tfurrows
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response 33 of 87:
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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.
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cross
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response 34 of 87:
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Mar 6 15:28 UTC 2018 |
What tfurrows said.
Also, a hallmark of both Grex and its sister site M-Net are a somewhat
ascerbic and dry sarcastic wit. It's not meant to be personal or mean;
just funny. Feel free to join in!
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mijk
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response 35 of 87:
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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.
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tod
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response 36 of 87:
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Mar 7 10:27 UTC 2018 |
I come here for the puzzles
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swolf154
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response 37 of 87:
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Mar 13 20:11 UTC 2018 |
I'm "Dazed and Confused". Does anyone have a quick answer to this
question? What the heck happened to Grex?? How does a "Public Service
System" lose the public? I've read most of the BBS stories and the history of
Grex. Does Grex believe they can revive Front/Talk / Back/Talk?? No seriously.
Is there a plan to bring in new users? Are you guys/gals just toot'in your
horn? Remembering the "Good Old days"? I'll tell you what..I'd kill to be
sitting in front of the console of Grex servers, wherever that is. But that's just
me. I had it great in 1994 with LI.NET but that was many moons ago. No
sense in crying over spilled milk right. So What the heck happened??
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papa
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response 38 of 87:
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Mar 13 23:46 UTC 2018 |
resp:37
The World-Wide Web happened.
Smartphones happened.
Broadband and Wi-Fi happened.
Angry Birds happened.
Where have you been?
We are here because we enjoy Grex more than the alternatives, but 1994
is not going to come around again.
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swolf154
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response 39 of 87:
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Mar 14 03:26 UTC 2018 |
I get that part. I guess I don't understand why Grex didn't jumpon the Web
bandwagon. Even I could see where the NET was going in 1994. There
was Google then MySpace, then Wordpress. Is running a Web server that
costly? I don't know? I know you UNIX guys hate the Web but man if it pays
the bills? Now I see Grex wants to try and put a spark into Gopher. I think
that's great but doesn't the world want a Web Page? Is Gopher going to
attract new users? What kind of new users? Programmers? Unix Admins? I
don't know?. How did SDF get so big? Maybe Grex needs a Server in
Iceland? Japan? Get me a Plan ticket. I'll go!
Anyway in case anyone is interested the Web side of Back Talk doesn't
work right but I managed to login. There's a 505 error that needs to be
fixed. It looks like Grex was on to something with Back/Talk. it's a damn
shame it didn't work out. Now don't everyone get all bent out of shape. I'm
not bashing Grex. If I could go for a walk with you guys (Wherever it is you
go) I surely would. I'd love to hear the "Grex Stories". I have a few of my
own.
That's just my opinion.........I could be wrong. ;-)
Steve
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tfurrows
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response 40 of 87:
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Mar 14 04:10 UTC 2018 |
Though I've been using *nix since the mid 90's, I'm a late arrival to the
public unix scene. I just found SDF and Grex a year or two ago. I found them
through gopher (well, found SDF that way, at the time, Grex didn't have
gopher.) Sure, the web is huge and all that, but it's not everything for
everyone it seems... hence the survival of SDF, and numerous other systems.
But I like your questions and your thinking: how will grex attract more users?
Certainly the web is one way to do it, but you'll have a lot of random people
to filter through before you can target the types that will join grex.
Education is another avenue, though I'm not sure how you'd target them.
Perhaps it really is just a matter of letting those who are interested filter
in and find it. Cross might be able to tell how many people have joined since
gopher was added, vs. recently months before that. Not sure what else could
be done, but ideas would be welcome!
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tfurrows
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response 41 of 87:
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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 :)
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swolf154
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response 42 of 87:
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Mar 14 13:00 UTC 2018 |
Ok. So how much advertising does Grex want? What would an "ad" look like?
I use a lot of BBS systems, news groups etc. Should young people be the
target audience? I'm not a programmer but isn't a UNIX shell account the
place to learn Python and other Programming languages? What about IRC?
Does Grex still have the NO BOTS policy? What does Grex offer that people
want and are willing to support for a few bucks a month?
I'll come up with an ad and post it on all the BBS's I'm on. I won't do that
until Grex agrees to it of course. I think most "newbies" would have difficulty
with Front/Talk but should have no problem with Back/Talk. BTW the 505 error
is only with Back/Talk on Grex.org and not Cyberspace.org.
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cross
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response 43 of 87:
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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.
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swolf154
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response 44 of 87:
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Mar 14 15:00 UTC 2018 |
Ok Got it. Get it. Good. I'm sure you are busy. Here's the thing. I KNOW
exactly where you're coming from. I was part of an Internet Dialup provider
called LINET. (Li.net) We went from 20 modems to 300 (Not enough) in 3
years. After 2 years in the house we had to move to a "real building" and
out of the house we rented. After 5 years it got too Crazy. The business
was sold. So yea. I get it. And I really think I may be of some use here. I'm
retired now. I have TOO much time on my hands. I would very much like to
volunteer in anyway I can (Remotely). My finger info is all real info. Let's
brain storm this thing and see what we can come with. I have no idea what
Grex is running on so I don't know what you can or can't handle as far as a
user base etc? OK I'm getting a "woody" thinking about this. LOL
My time at LINET was the best time of my life. I really missed "the boat".
Maybe I can get a second chance??
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cross
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response 45 of 87:
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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.
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swolf154
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response 46 of 87:
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Mar 14 19:29 UTC 2018 |
How is the security? Is OK for me to post Grex on Public Web Sites, BBS's,
Reddit? I don't want to "overwhelm" the system advertising to would be
hackers. What services would be safe to offer at this stage of the game? I
assume the software is still available. Newsgroups? IRC? Email? Personal Web
page (100mg) Gopher Lynx blah blah the list goes on and on. Tags like so
what do you pay to stay connected to your friends? You can do this for a lot
less at Grex. Or PayLess@grex. Ooooh. I'm brainstorming now. LOL! Ouch.. I
think I hurt my head.
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papa
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response 47 of 87:
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Mar 14 23:09 UTC 2018 |
If there's going to be a new Grexer recruiting drive, we should fix
Backtalk and Fronttalk. The accumulated bulletin board posts are one of
Grex's unique charm points, and the *talk systems are easier-to-learn
environments for users not already accustomed to the shell.
However, with the current bugs in both *talks, I wouldn't recommend
them to new users. Specifically, the "terminated by signal 11" Backtalk
crashes that occur when trying to open conference items when logged-in
on the web, and broken bookmarks in Frontend where "new" command lists
some items in spite of having been read previously.
The *talks could also use a "catchup" command so that users who don't
want to power-read through 20+ years-worth of posts on their first
visit can clear the unread item flags and track new items since their
previous connection.
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kentn
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response 48 of 87:
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Mar 15 00:20 UTC 2018 |
There have been suggestions for backtalk/frontalk before, but it seems
it's such old code that no one wants to really investigate it. As Perl
has changed versions and the OS has changed around it, it gets harder to
maintain.
But, if we could fix it, that would be great. The trouble is, the
original authors of the code are no longer around that we can find, so
to dig into it would take a lot of time for someone to fix it (someone
familiar with Perl coding amongst other things).
We used to have more people reading BBS on the web than at the command
line (though that was somewhat hard to prove). The nice thing about
reading on the web is cellphones and tablets could get involved too.
One suggestion for bbs was to allow editing of responses since we
occasionally make mistakes in our responses. That turned into a
censorship debate and was turned down. If you want to correct a
response, you need to delete it and re-enter it. Therefore, as you can
see making progress is rather difficult unless everyone agrees (which is
rarely the case).
Right now, if you can get our web-based command line going you can use
the bbs command and that's about as far as we can go right now with
web-based conferencing unless you can get the current web bbs working or
consider other options.
We could install a free web-based forum system on the Grex web site but
that would take someone to not only install it, but set it up correctly,
and maintain it (including moderation, most likely, as abhorrent as that
is to Grex users--but like a conference fair witness). It's not clear
if anyone has time for that, but it is one way to modernize Grex a bit.
It would likely diverge from the way bbs saves its data, so might split
the users (but if there are so few, does it matter?).
We have an item in Agoras past regarding how to improve and keep Grex
going (Grex Town Hall: How do we Move Forward). It initially had a
lot of responses, but not so much any more. In fact, we have not
"rolled" the Agora conference system for over a year now. It used to
be set up fresh (with popular on-going items linked from the previous
agora conference). Again it takes someone to do it and do it correctly.
Waiting for a consensus, as Dan implies above, is partly to blame for
this situation. The other is the perpetual lack of staff time.
I've been snowed under at work, too so it's been difficult to
concentrate on much more.
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tod
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response 49 of 87:
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Mar 15 04:04 UTC 2018 |
Text Or Die
re #39
AOL and the rest of the GUI mousepointing morons can have their World Wide
Web. Hytelnet as Iain called it. Why didn't Grex serve HTML and usenet
etc?
It did. And once you go there then you are on your own. Grex and MNet
were build around PicoSpan and then YAPP (read as: UNIX BBS)
Jan Wolter and some cats wrote party (read as: Instant Messaging)
ASCII
Web is crap. Go enjoy yourself if you don't like Grex.
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