response 50 of 105:

Jan 28 19:51 UTC 1995

I'd love to have the ability to block those repeated telemarketing-type
calls.  Some  caller ID boxes allow that (if you can afford them and the
caller ID service itself).  I also dislike repeated wrong number calls
from rude callers, many of those calls (I think) originating from the
same source (e.g., memory phones).  With caller ID I could call them
back after they've called me six times and made rude remarks, and ask them
to cease and desist.

response 52 of 105:

Jan 28 20:38 UTC 1995

Re #47: cicero
Ok, let's drop telemarketers out of this discussion for now, they only cloud
the issue. My point is that *anytime* you initiate a call, no matter it's 
purpose, you have, at the very least, *disturbed* someone else's privacy
and at most you have invaded their privacy.

As the disturber, you have responsibility of either making or not making
the call, as the disturbee, I then have the right to find out as much 
about you as possible. As the initiator of an action, you tend to waive
some of your rights when you start the interaction.

Unfortuneatly, our culture tends to train us from a young age with an
almost Pavlovian response to the phone. It rings, and most people drop
whatever they are doing and run to pick it up. It's a very strong urge
and it's hard to fight. Anytime that thing rings, your life is interupted
and you are unable to choose the moment of that interuption. That lack
of choice defines the invasion aspect in my mind. The caller, on the other
hand, always has a *choice*.

response 54 of 105:

Jan 29 03:34 UTC 1995

Folks, you can all move up here to Sault Ste. Marie where the telemarketers
know there are few people buying.  It is amazingly peaceful, but the standard
of living is hohum ;-)

response 56 of 105:

Jan 29 08:42 UTC 1995

There's a direct marketing association you can write to, to reduce sales
calls and junk mail.  Anyway, to undrift for a moment....
 
I was thinking, another advantage of having officially sanctioned "anonymous"
accounts would be that they could allow new users to check out Grex before
deciding whether they want to go through the newuser program.  When folks
type "help" at the login:, it could mention you can log in as "guest" or
something for a quick look around.  If an official guest/anon account could
be configured to eliminate mail and password changes, and clear .cf files
and such, it would seem quite workable.  I've seen this idea used on many
MOOs and MUDs (multiplayer games on the internet) to cut down on once-used
accounts.  They sometimes use several guest logins, like guest1, guest2,
etc., so that when a user uses "guest" as a login, they're assigned a guest
account that's not currently in use by someone else.
 
<Ajax now cowers in expectation of the reaction of the Grex Establishment :)>

response 58 of 105:

Jan 29 16:01 UTC 1995

This idea has been discussed before, but hasn't been addressed recently.
As I recall it is a tradeoff. The advantage of offering such an account
is that it would cut down on accounts created and immediately abandoned,
and that it would offer users a chance to see what conferencing was like
without having to spend the time required to create an account.
Those are big advantages.

The disadvantages are that we really would want "guest" to be a restricted-use
account. We would not want email or conference entries generated by "guest".
This would require changes to software, and in particular changes to picospan
for which we do not have access to the source code.

In the past, staff has always favored the current approach, but recently
the number of abandoned accounts has skyrocketed, and perhaps this needs
to be reevaluated. I'm sure I did not list all of the issues, though.

response 60 of 105:

Jan 29 22:06 UTC 1995

Steve, haven't the abandoned accounts skyrocketed because we have not been
implementing an active reaping policy (and announcing same somewhere)? 

response 62 of 105:

Jan 30 07:16 UTC 1995

I agree with #59.  There's no problem with guest accounts posting to 
conferences.  We don't need to do a thing to Picospan.  The only technical 
question I can think of then is can we disalow sending of mail form said
"guest" account?  If so, then I think we should create these forthwith.

response 64 of 105:

Jan 30 10:30 UTC 1995

The main problem I see with guests sending mail is that they may expect
replies, which there's no guarantee *they*'ll get.  Though others express
concern over what other sysops might think if they get complaints about
mail from guest@cyberspace.org.  Granted it looks kinda bad, but (a) the
same messages can be sent by any made-up account here, and (b) so what? :)
So I'd say just alias "mail" to explain to the user that they should
really set up their own account to use mail; that there's no charge, nor
need for true identity.  If they want to work around the alias, so be it.
Guest mail could even be useful to mail staff that the sender's own Grex
account has a problem!  (Okay, I'm scraping for justifications here |->.
 
To deal with the password issue, and potentially have the login id "guest"
map to accounts for "guest1".."guestn", the login program could be modified,
the same way it recognizes "newuser" and "help" as a special commands, eh?

response 66 of 105:

Jan 30 18:43 UTC 1995

Why?  Why not give guests the same service they can get by using a bogus name?

response 68 of 105:

Jan 31 11:16 UTC 1995

I've been conferencing for over 10 years on Unix/Picospan-based systems,
first on M-Net and now here.  The current discussion is at least the
half-dozenth go-around I've seen of the "can we set up a guest account
so folks can try things out?" question.  Despite all previous discussions,
it's never been done.  I suspect that's because of the effort that would
be involved in setting things up so that people can do enough to check
out the system but would not be able to do too much, and some skepticism
whether the benefits would be worth the effort.

response 70 of 105:

Feb 1 02:45 UTC 1995

   You wanna write up a functional specification for this?

   Far be it for me to say that we shouldn't experiment.  Perhaps
too many of us have been thinking about it for too long, and have
too many negative views of it.  So a FS might show some of us the
way to start it off.
   There is still the effort to do this that has to be found, but
perhaps someone will step forward during all this. It seems to be
worth thinking about more, at the very least.

response 72 of 105:

Feb 1 05:00 UTC 1995

Incidentally, someone is already using the account name "guest", though
it doesn't look like this person has logged in since October 20.

response 74 of 105:

Feb 1 14:25 UTC 1995

   If all the specialized programming that was needed for this was to
modify login for this, we're in good shape.  It would not be hard to
do that.