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Grex > Coop9 > #27: Motion: To allow anonymous reading via Backtalk | |
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| 25 new of 624 responses total. |
albaugh
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response 285 of 624:
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Jan 7 19:07 UTC 1997 |
I still think we could interest a potential new grexian enough to register
by just showing a list of conferences and the items in them, instead of making
the actual items themselves available for unregistered reading. Is there any
benefit to grex and grexians by encouraging web lurkers? If grex's objective
is to improve things for grexians, then encourage nongrexians to register.
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kerouac
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response 286 of 624:
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Jan 7 21:08 UTC 1997 |
If we have anonymous reading via backtalk, would we then have "guest"
login access via picospan too?
This is blown out of proportion because right now backtalk is too slow to
make it reasonable for an anonymous person to read entire confs through it.
One suggestion would be to *rotate* the confs that are offered for
access to anonymous readers, say monthly. This way anonymous readers will
have access to all of the confs at one time or another. Agora, Coop
and INtro can beoffered all of the time. The other confs would rotate
in groups on and off the "anonymous access" list from month to month, beingon
the list like every third month or so.
And the anonymous access list (of the confs currently being offered
for anonymous readers) can be kept in a public file so that users can know
before they post anyting if their conf is on the list for that month.
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valerie
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response 287 of 624:
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Jan 8 00:12 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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kerouac
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response 288 of 624:
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Jan 8 02:06 UTC 1997 |
I think the "rotating confs" idea does answer their concerns in a way. If
they know ahead of time that a conf is going to be on the "unregistered
users access" list for thirty days, they can remove any item for that
period and then if they choose put items back once the list has rotated
again. As long as users have the opportunity to remove their items or
refrain from entering items, by knowing in advance which month
unregistered users can read a particular conf, I think it answers the
basic objections to unrestricted access to all theconfs all the time.
I'm thinking of breaking grex's confs into three groups and every month
unregistered users would have access to a different group. This also
answers Jan's concerns that unregistered users be encouraged to register,
because they will never be able to read a conf for more than a month at a
time without registering.
This also accomplishes the purpose of letting unregistered users get a
true taste of grex and its confs, without anyone deciding arbitrarily
which confs are available or unavailable to unregistered users.
One side of this debate wants unregistered users to have access to all the
confs. The other side wants to be able to post items without worrying
about users having such access.
This compromise answers both concerns and is reasonable IMO.
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tsty
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response 289 of 624:
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Jan 8 02:08 UTC 1997 |
?????????POST? i thought you said "read?"
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kerouac
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response 290 of 624:
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Jan 8 02:13 UTC 1997 |
I did say post, for registered users, not unregistered users.
Addendum to my proposal: I suggest their be one conf and one conf only
that unregistered users not have access to. That would be the
storage conf, so that Jenna for instance, if Poetry is going to be offered
on the unregistered access list for the month of May or something, she can
link over all of her poems to storage and then link them back when the
list rotates again.
I also think that as such, all current fw's should be given co-fw status
in the storage conf so that the current storage fw's dont get overwhelmed
with requests.
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kerouac
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response 291 of 624:
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Jan 8 02:22 UTC 1997 |
oh, and as for older messages..I think any fw who has a conf with potentailly
sensitive mateiral should archive and restart their confs before a new
unregistered users policy begins. Poetry desperately needs a restart anyway
and
most of the other confs wouldnt be hurt by a re-start if it was deemed
neessary.
(note that Storeage conf is there to save archived material and that
unregistered users wuld not have access to storage)
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kerouac
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response 292 of 624:
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Jan 8 02:55 UTC 1997 |
Even better addendum.. Instead of rotating the confs monthly,
break the confs into *four* groups and rotate seasonlly and
do it in conjunction with each agora restart. This way
each conf would be available to unregistered users only at once
specific period each year (poetry and sexuality in the summer,
politics and history in the fall, .etc .etc)
This might even be better because unregistered users could read a
conf for a whole season before having to register to read it further
(surely noone reading a conf for that long is going to want to wait ayear
to be able to readit again!)
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jenna
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response 293 of 624:
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Jan 8 03:04 UTC 1997 |
I think Kerouac, your idea is more of a pin in the ass
to everyone than even the rules and bureacracy remmers
dreads. I know that if you do this, I'm delteing my items
permanenlty, period. I don't have time to link and unlink
hundreds of items every three or four mnths, I'm a full-time
student, as I get oler i have more and more to do and
less time for Grex at all.
--
The 90 day trail as proposed would be 90 days of objectionable
behavior. That's hardly a trial. How about a 90 trial
of allowing the conferences to decide. That seems like a more usefull
trsiakl (god I hate ntalks)
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kerouac
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response 294 of 624:
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Jan 8 03:16 UTC 1997 |
Jenna you have to compromise...anything that allows you to decide permanently
is not ac ompromise any more than if all the confs were available. This
allows your conf to be unavaialble to unregistered users three fourths of the
year
How much more reasonable could you want that that?
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raven
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response 295 of 624:
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Jan 8 03:29 UTC 1997 |
Kerouac *you* are the one not compramising here, my compramise would allow
for aprox 86% of the confs to be anonymous access all the time and it
protects the commnuinty feeling in poetry, sexuality etc all the time.
Plus it's simplicity compared to your byzantine rotation structure. :-)
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janc
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response 296 of 624:
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Jan 8 04:12 UTC 1997 |
I just ran into something interesting. While doing an Altavista search
I ran across this:
Backtalk Crash
Backtalk Crash. Oops. Backtalk has encountered a internal error. ERROR:
Undefined symbol 'login' in pistachio/chpwform:2. Stack:...
http://www.hvcn.org/cgi-bin/bt/pistachio/chpwform - size 2K - 3 Dec 96
The interesting thing here is that Alta Vista does seem to index cgi-bin
program output, at least sometimes. Here Alta Vista's web crawler seems
to have tried to change its Backtalk password on HVCN, which didn't work
because it wasn't authenticated . Alta Vista then merrily indexed the
error dump page.
It also seems to have indexed one of Backtalk's help pages, and some of the
Welcome pages. It doesn't seem to have actually indexed any items on HVCN
(or Grex) even though HVCN has unregistered reading enabled.
I'm still pretty sure none of these thinsg will index the conferences with
unregistered reading enabled, but they sure are weird.
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valerie
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response 297 of 624:
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Jan 8 04:55 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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rcurl
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response 298 of 624:
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Jan 8 07:08 UTC 1997 |
Just to toss another spice into the kettle...how about a 90 day trial during
which 50% of the conferences *chosen at random* in a double-blind design
are opened to anonymous reading? The question is - can anyone tell if one
is or is not? (I realize the paranoid could connect anonymously to see
if this or that cf were available - we'll have to agree to play by the rules
and not do that... heh.).
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chelsea
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response 299 of 624:
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Jan 8 16:24 UTC 1997 |
After we settle this could we then move right along into some type of
Confcom discussion? (We are clearly following in M-net's footsteps.)
I too would rather we keep things as they are than get into complicated
compromises. Soon, we will be so busy meta-organizing conference
administration that we'll only attract folks who like to meta-organize
conferences.
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kerouac
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response 300 of 624:
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Jan 8 16:37 UTC 1997 |
Valerie, you should go back and re-read Remmers objections to that proposal.
Itis a bad idea even if it is a 90-day trial and as Remmers noted, how do you
guage what a real consensus is when so many people in each conf lurk and
who wants the bureacracy and the pain of each conf making their own rule ssand
if this is done , how doyou respond topeople who the3n want to close their
confs to *registered* users?
This would be saying its okay to discriminate against one group of users
but not another? Ireally think that idea is anti-grex and it appalls me
that a co-founder of grex would even consider for a minute signing off on
something like that. Even for ninety days.
The rotation idea is really simple. Break the confs into four grups so
that no one conf is available to unregistered users for more than 90 days
each year. It is NOT byzantine and it doesnt have each conf making their
own rules. It allows for users to beable toprotect their own items and
toknow when their favorite confs are going to beavaialable in that manner.
\
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kerouac
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response 301 of 624:
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Jan 8 17:00 UTC 1997 |
The preamble to thebylaws states:
"It is the objective of this organization to provide anopen-access
computer conferencing system"
I submit that if any of grex's conferences are allowed to make themselves
permanently unavailable to any group of users, then grex is no longer open
access. An unregistered user of grex is still a user of grex and grex
cannot be true to its mission if any user of grex is permanently denied
access to its conferences.
"Open Access" isnt a vague term. It is a very exact and specific term.
It means that everything is accessible and available for every user on
this board. EVERY user.
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rcurl
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response 302 of 624:
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Jan 8 19:52 UTC 1997 |
Unfortuantely, "open access" is a vague term. You can still have "open
access", no matter what procedures you institute. In any case, no matter how
web readers are handled, everything still remains accessible by some route.
It is obviously not necessary to permit *all* routes (e.g., Grex does not
provide its services in Braille).
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raven
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response 303 of 624:
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Jan 8 20:30 UTC 1997 |
Kerouac if you dangle the red herring of open access one more time I
shall have to pickle it and eat it. :-) Seriously, though, all confernces
will continue to be open access, tell me who can't run newuser? Furthurmore
anonymous users even if they are able to access all conferences won't be
able to post and you don't seem to have a problem with that as unequal
access. The thing you fail to realize is that conferences on Grex are
radically different and some people don't want strangers in thier
metaphorical living room. By your logic Grex would only have 1 confernce,
instead we have 92 confernces that address very different needs in the
Grex community. If some conferences don't want to live by *your* standrds
of what constitues community and anonmity I say let them.
I again propose lets let the conferences vote on whether they want to be
anonymously accessible or not for a 90 day *trial* period. I really don't
think it will create the burecratic hastle Remmers & Chelsea think it
will. An informal agreement among fws to not link items between anonymous
and non-anonymous confernces without asking the fw of the non-anonymous
conference should suffice. I have been on Grex for years and frankly the
only fw I can imagine who would be petty & selfish enough to link between
anon and non-anon confernces without asking would be Kerouac. If he did
in fact start linking unrelated items from say poetry or sexuality to
world solely for the purpose of disrupting conferncing then I think there
would be pretty good grounds for staff to can him as an fw, problem
solved, if not, not.
Kerouac I'm sorry if this post comes off as a personal attack, however,
your insensativity to views different than yours is *really* annoying to
me.
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kerouac
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response 304 of 624:
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Jan 8 21:22 UTC 1997 |
Raven, I think you are the one who is showing insensitivity. The ONLY
views you have concerns for are those on one side of the issue. My
compromise gives something to both sides. And when you cant
argue you point any more you start making it personal. Why cant
you just understand that having each conf making its own rules would
create mass confusion. Partiuclarly for new users who would jump from conf
to conf having to learn different sets of rules for each conf.
Grex's conferences are not intimate. Strangers read them everyday.
Logins are not verified and people routinely use bogus names. Those
opposed to anonymous read access are opposing something that already
exsists and has for a long time. The idea that grex's confs are closed,
intimate, or for or about any small group of people is ridiculous.
The only compromise between all of the time and none of the time is "some
of the time" And that is what this comes down to.
A strong conferencing system is one in which a user feels comfortable
jumping from conf to conf, knowoing that each conf belongs to the same
community and folows the same sets of rules and philosophies. You want
to destroy that here on Grex..
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krj
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response 305 of 624:
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Jan 8 21:31 UTC 1997 |
<krj starts to respond and then remembers his New Year's Resolution. :) >
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valerie
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response 306 of 624:
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Jan 8 21:42 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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raven
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response 307 of 624:
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Jan 8 22:52 UTC 1997 |
re #304 Well lets just put it this way my compramise is agreeable to all
the people I have talked to who have strong concerns about anonymous
access, your is not agreeable to those people. Your "compramise" would cause
tthe fw of the poetry conf to leave taking about 1/3 of the items there with
her, as well as probably causing several people to leave Grex permanently.
You are just plain wrong when you say I'm not giving on both sides of the
issue, under my proposal *86%* of the conferences would be open to anonymous
access 24-7 365 days a year. I actually think anonymous access is a
*good* idea to increase the diversity of the Grex user base. I just think
that showing sensativity to those who view there confernces as a community
is a wise thing to do. You are wrong when you say certain confernces on
Grex aren't intimate, both the poetry and sexuality conference have a
relaxed living room feel to them, and I can understand how people would
feel uncomfortable having unregistered users drifitng in and out of those
confernces.
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kerouac
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response 308 of 624:
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Jan 8 23:06 UTC 1997 |
#307...but people drift into and out of those confs all the time! And how
do you come up with 86% when you have no idea which confs (other than one
or two) would want to cut themselves off from anonymous users? I think
you are more interested in your friends interests than you are in grex's.
Grex does not need every conf having its own rules of access, even on the
smallest points.
The confs should all be playing by the same rules. The status quo would
be better than your proposal. At least by rotating the confs, anonymous
users would get the opportunity to sample everything that grex has to
offer at one point or another.
Fair Witnesses do not own conferences! Even the active users dont own the
conference. All of the people who enter it to read, lurk observe or just
hang around are a part of it. There is no way you could ever tell if any
vote taken within aconf was a valid representation of the true feelings of
all of those people.
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jenna
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response 309 of 624:
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Jan 9 06:25 UTC 1997 |
The word community is thrown around alot.
My schol recently decided that it was detrimental to the community
to allow somehwat lewd anime to be posted on walls. 360 students stood up
and said, in different ways, "If we all support this, and want this
but this 'community' doesn't. then who is the community?" If the people
who make up the community are not what decides what the community wants,
that's not really much of a community
is it?
-
I think most nonsensative conferences will not vote in favor of being closed.
Fairwitnesse don't own conferences. But they're not evil people either.
And hey, if you lie, let someone besides the fw DECIDE WHAT THE CONVERSATION
IN THE CONFERENCE POINTS
TO.
mAKE SOME POOR STAFER do it for every single cnference ( aplogies ofr caps).
(It's late, I can't type)
I support a compromise that allows conferences to decide.
However, any compromise that randomly chooses 50% of the conferences
is as good as no compromise at all. I dont think you understand the objection
to
all confrences open if you even propose something like that as a compromise.
Everybody
is trying here, but let's be rational. Sensative information is not randomly
distrubuted, and its what I object to sticking on the web.
Rotations are a pain in the ass, then no one ever knows what's going on
and you run into the same problem as with random choosing. Nothing is
permanent.
I would not have a conference permanently decide to be one way or the other.
It would always be opn to that conferences current communities peferences.
However, I do believe in the right of choice.
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