response 26 of 382:

Nov 16 16:52 UTC 1995

I halfway agree.  I'm concerned about the inevitable crises about what's
commercial, say, when Mary posts an announcement of her neighbor's garage
sale with tons of old & maybe rare LPs?  Having such a rule is going to
require an enforcement mechanism, and that's going to mean someone's having
to pass judgment *at least* whenever someone complains ... and if *only* when
someone complains, then those who we clamp down on are likely to complain
(rightly) that they're being singled out.  I hate the thought of the extra
link traffic, but I *really* hate the management job this involves.

response 28 of 382:

Nov 16 18:37 UTC 1995

I prefer to specify some numerical limits (filespace, bytes transferred,
etc), with of course the capability to permit more by jusitifed request,
because it requires less management time and helps prevents inequities.
I would particularly not want to give members a higher maximum than
non-members, unless we adopt a policy to that effect. We should not have
any hidden resource "perks" for members. 

response 30 of 382:

Nov 17 05:47 UTC 1995

  In that situation, you could pay $2/mo to one of the organizations
you suggest, and change the links in your primary web page to that
site.  I don't see a need for web disk quotas beyond normal disk
quotas, nor for web bandwidth/access quotas until or unless there is
evidence they're using a sizable chunk of Grex's resources.  But *if*
that happens, users (including those using Grex for profit) are able
to move their pages elsewhere if they want to keep them available.

response 32 of 382:

Nov 17 09:27 UTC 1995

Actually, no. That issue is merely a matter of opinion, and you might 
actually convince me otherwise if you can come up with a neat design.

Our area of "big disagreement" was over your idea of making http packets
high priority. That is simply wrong. If everyone on the system voted
to do it, it would still be wrong. Like the apochyphal story of some
southern states legislature voting to change "pi" to "3" so it would be
easier to deal with, there are certain things you can't vote into "rightness".

response 34 of 382:

Nov 18 01:13 UTC 1995

  I've already stated my opposition to web quotas at this point, in
case that wasn't clear, but to answer your last paragraph....
 
  Same reason we "punish" users for having graphical web pages, for
having a large mail spool, or for using a lot of disk space - to
keep the system working alright for the rest of our users.  Given
Grex's limited resources, we've prioritized what's important to us.
 
  If it comes down to it, if http traffic starts interfering with
e-mail delivery, you can guess which will be deemed more important.
Among possible solutions would be limiting busy pages, as we plan
to limit big mail spools.  Once mail quotas are in place, malicious
users will also be able to flood your mailbox (I think?).
 
  You raise a good point if web access quotas are ever seriously
considered, though I don't think it invalidates the idea.  An attempt
at detection of such "sabotage" could be made.  But hopefully there
won't be a need for such quotas anyway.

response 36 of 382:

Nov 18 01:47 UTC 1995

Exactly what I say.

Re 34 - But there is clearly a difference between accesses
on a Web page and the size/contents of the page.  The user
can control how big his/her page is, and can choose not to
include huge pictures files.  (On Grex, their choice doesn't
really enter into it, or course.)  But a user cannot control
what other users at other Internet sites do.

response 38 of 382:

Nov 18 03:30 UTC 1995

If we had a T3 connection and a lot more CPU, then none of
this would be much of an issue, no.  This is the problem
with overpopulation, more and more people are trying to use
the same resources.  Of course, if some of those people
became members...

response 40 of 382:

Nov 18 04:49 UTC 1995

I'm against rigid quotas on accesses.  But there are clearly some web pages
that generate a heck of a lot more traffic than others.  If we had someone
write a web-page that's so trendy and cool it gets written up in Newsweek,
Wired and all the other trendy web media, we'd have a problem.  We'd buckle
under the load.  We'd really be forced to ask the user to move his page
elsewhere, and leave a pointer here to there.

So the basic, unwritten rule of Grex pages must be "You can have a Web page
here, so long as it is of modest size, and basically boring".

Sure, the rule sounds dumb, but I don't think Grex could survive a really
popular web page, even if it wasn't all that big.

I'm sure, however, that our staff can distinguish someone using the web to
attack a page on our system from hordes of genuinely interested people.

The staff currently does concern itself with people who send or receive too
much Email.  We don't have any fixed limit on how much Email traffic a
Grexer may generate, but we know a problem when we see one.  I'd think
Web Traffic would have to be handled the same way.

response 42 of 382:

Nov 18 13:11 UTC 1995

How about if we ask the owners of the more popular sites
to include a pointer on becoming a member of Grex?  >8)

response 44 of 382:

Nov 19 15:48 UTC 1995

re #42:  Sounds like another statistics program is in order. :)

response 46 of 382:

Nov 23 01:28 UTC 1995

I would really hope we take a "hands-off" approach to Web pages for the
time being.  The whole phenomenon is just too new for us to be able to
make any judgments about what "contributes" to Grex.  Just call me
a free-marketer!   8-)
        Frankly, I thought the whole Web would be a passing fad, and
that it would collapse back to relative obscurity in about 6 months,
due in part to the molasses-like speed of viewing all those graphics.
(I even *prefer* lynx at this point for that reason!)
        Setting limits also means allocating staff time to enforcing
those limits.  Plus cries of censorship would inevitably arise.
        If we really do need to "do something" because Grex is
becoming constipated from Web pages, why not say that people who
exceed their directory quotas for any reason are asked to pay, say,
$2 per month extra?

response 48 of 382:

Nov 23 15:44 UTC 1995

The general approach we've had with limits is to wait until something
becomes a demonstrable problem, and then, if we can't convince users to
stop doing it, we implement some sort of automatic limit.  For instance,
we have a disk space policy, but we've never had to automate a solution,
because we have enough extra space that just warning users has been
sufficient.  We did have a problem with people sending very large files
through mail, and choking up the whole system.  Mail, today, has special
logic to detect large files, and feed them through more slowly.  We had
a problem with people putting fancy glitzy graphics on grex, and
incidently eating up tons of disk space, *and* posting graphics of a
questionable legal nature on grex.  The current "no graphics" policy
stems directly from that, and we would have an automated solution in
place today, except that our httpd software out-dumbed us.

The feedback we've gotten from users affected by the "no graphics"
policy I think could be best described as "a hostile feeling of spoilt
entitlement".  That is to say, I think it's safe to say these people
have no idea how much of the system they're eating up, no interest in
paying for that share, and little respect for the people people who paid
for the system or make it work.

Let me be a bit more graphic about what I'm talking about.  The number
one offender of the "no graphics" rule has been posting pictures that
purport to be of sex with underage children.  Last time he was caught,
he had managed to consume about 4 megabytes of disk space here with this
sort of thing.  He consistently either fails to respond to mail, or
isn't at all cooperative about moving his business elsewhere.  He has
never been a grex member, and I doubt ever will be.  We aren't talking
about a cute "start" button here.  We are talking about something *way*
out in left field from what I think most people here would like to see
Grex be about.  Now, I'll grant you, this person is an extreme case, and
I can assure you, nobody on staff wants to be in the position of
censoring anything, or even appearing to do so, but I sure think we want
to be damn sure whatever policy we design will be 100% effective against
this guy.

A more typical example is the person who thinks a couple of 20K gif's
are "no trouble at all".  They aren't, if you have a T3 connected
computer.  They aren't even bad, if you're the *only* consumer of a
28.8k link, or even if you're only one of 2-10 web pages at a site.  But
I don't think we could extend the privilege of having 20K gif's to too
many home pages before we ran into serious network congestion problems.
Not only won't we be able to do any of the other things I think we value
on Grex, we won't *even* be able to do a decent job with those Gif's! Ah
yes, there's a technical detail that bears mentioning here.  When
netscape fetches a web page with 8 pictures on it, it doesn't fetch each
graphic one at a time.  It starts up all 8 at once.  If you have 8
netscape's each fetching the same page "at the same time", they'll all
pile 64 requests in within a matter of seconds.  This is a great thing
when you have a fast server and a slow workstation.  It's obviously just
about exactly the worst thing you could do to grex.