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Grex > Coop6 > #64: Better communication w/user&members | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 51 responses total. |
roz
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response 25 of 51:
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Dec 28 12:50 UTC 1994 |
Do y'all mean a _real_ newsletter, with lots of work involved and all?
Hope you keep it to a minimum so the marvelous and devoted grex staff
don't burn out. I'd be happy with an e-mail once in a while telling me
anything I might have missed in the fast-scrolling motd that has
importance and that I might want to file for reference.
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kt8k
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response 26 of 51:
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Dec 28 14:44 UTC 1994 |
I think that changing the MOTD to keep it interesting is a very good thing,
and that access to a grex info file (not necessarily a newsletter - it IS
a lot of work) could be promoted there. Email might be used to let members
know when they were due to "re-up" their memberships, or perhaps an automatic
logon message in the last month of their current paid term. The work of
creating a newsletter is possibly too much for the "inner circle" of grex,
but people who make changes and additions could briefly describe them in a
file that could be accessed by any user via a simple command like "grexnews"
or something. The job of putting people on and taking them off email distrib.
lists would be too much, too. An automatic mail responder thing might work,
and could be promoted in the MOTD.
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andyv
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response 27 of 51:
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Dec 28 15:06 UTC 1994 |
Thanks for the input, roz and Tim. Maybe a news letter would be perfectly
suited for people like me who are around the U.S. but still want to contribute.
I can't seem to get over my curiosity about Grex. I wish it was easier to
get the info I would like. I started to do the newsletter, would I need
the approval of the board to make it a sanctioned publication? I guess I could
just e-mail all the members with whatever I put together but then it wouldn't
be our newsletter. I could have people e-mail me articles.
I heard from one of the members that motd could have some color added. A
saying for each day, I think wouldn't take up too much room. There are lots
of people into that kind of thing here. Is there one person with final
responsibility for motd?
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davel
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response 28 of 51:
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Dec 28 18:10 UTC 1994 |
There is no one person. I think Valerie happens to be the single most
frequent modifier of the motd, but STeve & John Remmers do it reasonably
often, & there are probably others. <sticks neck out>
IMNAAHO, playing with the motd to keep it "interesting" is a bad idea. Some
people log on many times a day, others once a week or less. I mean those
who would consider themselves as active users (or be considered so by others).
Their needs are different. Moreover, I think most who simply ignore the
motd do so not because it's not changing or not interesting but because they
find the information given is rarely of interest to them, so they develop
the habit of skipping it. Inserting more nonessentials merely encourages
this trend.
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cel
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response 29 of 51:
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Dec 28 20:51 UTC 1994 |
someone in another item mentioned the unix "news" command (not usenet).
this might be a good use of such a facility. if someone can point me to
it, i volunteer to try to make it work on grex.
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steve
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response 30 of 51:
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Dec 29 01:26 UTC 1994 |
Thanks! But I don't know where is lives myself.
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srw
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response 31 of 51:
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Dec 29 05:28 UTC 1994 |
Email *is* used to remind members to re-up.
A newsletter would have to have a new volunteer to run it.
I'd like to see that. If someone did volunteer, staff would provide info to
include in it from time to time, I'm sure.
Maybe the "news" software could be found by checking an "archie" server?
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andyv
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response 32 of 51:
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Dec 29 05:53 UTC 1994 |
I wish I were living in Ann Arbor ;( Let me know how I can help whoever you
are (volunteer).
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srw
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response 33 of 51:
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Dec 29 06:12 UTC 1994 |
Not all helpers need to live in Ann Arbor. I can't think of a good reason
that the newsletter volunteer would need to be here, for example.
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andyv
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response 34 of 51:
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Dec 29 06:19 UTC 1994 |
I volunteer.
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bartlett
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response 35 of 51:
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Jan 2 17:57 UTC 1995 |
There is a very simple mechanism to create a mailing list right here on
Grex. To wit: create an account with the login "grexnews" or something
like that. In that account, place a .forward file with the names of all
current members. Then, Email sent to that account is automatically
forwarded to all the members. If a member didn't want to be on the
mailing list, the newsletter custodian could simply delet his/her name
from the list of logins in the .forward file.
I wouldn't think this would break Grex's mailer, but II might be wrong.
Andy, you could then either forward Email sent to you by staffers to
grexnews, or staff could simply post to it at their discretions, and you
could simply act as the list custodian. That shouldn't take much time at
all, and should work.
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mju
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response 36 of 51:
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Jan 2 19:36 UTC 1995 |
Er, that's one way of creating a mailing list, but not really the
preferred way. If you want to set up a mailing list, please talk to
staff first. Assuming that it isn't going to be a high-volume list
or something similar that will overly tax our Internet link, we'll set
up an alias in /etc/aliases that expands to the contents of a file
in your home directory. Then you can maintain the list by editing that
file, and you don't have to suck up a UID and a home directory and
similar resources by having a user.
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andyv
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response 37 of 51:
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Jan 3 04:15 UTC 1995 |
I've been thinking about the volume problem. I was thinking about just
asking people if they want to subscribe and creating a mail list that way.
I could get notes and articles from other people who want to submit.
This way the Grex board doesn't have to sanction anything. It would be
an extension Grex's mission as stated in the Bylaws but not under its
control. Grex provides the means of good communication not the communication.
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popcorn
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response 38 of 51:
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Jan 6 03:10 UTC 1995 |
Um. Lately Grex's mail spool is perpetually nearly full. A newsletter
has the potential to completely swamp things. I don't personally see
a use for having a newsletter (that's what the conferences are for, right?),
but I wouldn't argue strongly against it, either, since clearly the
conferences aren't reaching everybody.
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kentn
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response 39 of 51:
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Jan 6 05:15 UTC 1995 |
What percentage of Grex users read the conferences? I thought the idea
of a newsletter was to reach people that don't normally participate
in the conferences. Also, the idea to just email a short "where to
find the newsletter" message instead of the whole newsletter has been
proposed several times here.
Via a newsletter, btw, you can explain *why* the mail spool is
perpetually full and what users can do to help the situation. Many
of those users only use the party program and email, so I'm not sure
how you are going to reach them otherwise.
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srw
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response 40 of 51:
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Jan 6 06:55 UTC 1995 |
Even though the mail spool seems to be perpetually nearly full, I don't think
that should stop any plans to email a newsletter. I think we should be
thinking of finding other ways of dealing with the mail spool.
I think there's real value in emailing a smallish newsletter rather than a
pointer. That extra effort necessary to follow a pointer will result in
a certain amount of lost readership, imo.
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popcorn
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response 41 of 51:
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Jan 6 14:12 UTC 1995 |
(I didn't mean that there shouldn't be a newsletter -- just that we
should hold off sending it 'til the mail spool can handle it.)
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srw
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response 42 of 51:
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Jan 7 03:12 UTC 1995 |
(Oh, OK then, that's fine. I agree)
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steve
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response 43 of 51:
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Jan 10 02:47 UTC 1995 |
The reason why the mail spool dir is getting full so often is because
while we've grown tremendously, we haven't increased the size of /var/spool.
This gets back to an arithmatic error that was made during the carving up
of space last summer, but even more importantly, it shows the fact that we
are simply outgrowing our current disk allotments for a number of things.
Once the disk problem is settled we're going to have to think about when
the "little" 330M disks inside the Sun-3 are going to get upgraded to
something bigger.
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andyv
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response 44 of 51:
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Jan 10 02:55 UTC 1995 |
If I just switch over to another freenet for my mail, I wonder how much of
an impact that would make. A little I imagine. would be no big deal, and
the otheres generally run faster.
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srw
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response 45 of 51:
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Jan 10 07:07 UTC 1995 |
One change to the mail spool recently happened and should be mentioned here.
Valerie scanned it to find mail files that belong to accounts that were
reaped in November. Their home directories and mail files were never
deleted, and many of the reaped users were reinstated, so this plan
was sound.
However, the time has come to delete the mail files. This has now occurred,
resulting in 11 MB of additional free spool space. Our spool is still too small
for the number of users and the amount of mail we handle, but it has been
freed of a major impediment, and that's good.
It should take a few days to fill up that much space.
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andyv
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response 46 of 51:
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Jan 21 16:28 UTC 1995 |
Grexnews is a cf now. I hope it will be liste din the conf list soon and
that some other folks will share an article concering their favorite cf.
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andyv
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response 47 of 51:
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Feb 1 17:39 UTC 1995 |
Is there any way I can find out which cf items are getting lots of responces?
I would like to let people know what are the hot items on grex in the
grexnews cf.
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popcorn
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response 48 of 51:
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Feb 4 00:04 UTC 1995 |
I've been thinking about this for a few days but haven't come up with a
good answer. You could put a bunch of conferences into your .cflist
file and then type "check" to get a summary of how many new items and
responses there are in each of them. But that wouldn't really do it.
Hm.
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kentn
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response 49 of 51:
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Feb 4 00:49 UTC 1995 |
When I saw :47, my immediate thought was to run a "browse" in each
cf and compare it to yesterday's browse results.
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