response 72 of 92:

Mar 24 14:29 UTC 1999

The criteria - including that one - would have to be decided.
I strongly prefer option 3, for the kinds of reasons John gave.

response 74 of 92:

Mar 25 14:59 UTC 1999

I'd favor Option 3 as well.

response 76 of 92:

Apr 15 22:55 UTC 1999

Re resp:19  Hear, hear!!

re resp:23 and resp:24  I propose a compromise (for the end of a long
todo list)  On the BBS's that I enjoyed in my halcyon college days, each post
that was a response to a particular post had a tag at the beginning so stating,
and if there were responses to it, there were similar tags designating them.
Something similar might be workable here.  I think it would increase the number
of responses, tho', w/o increasing the quality thereof.

response 78 of 92:

Apr 16 10:31 UTC 1999

Not that I know of. I've permitted html in the Enigma cf, however.

response 80 of 92:

Apr 16 14:57 UTC 1999

I've got HTML turned ON in hangout, but hangout is still very new and 
very small.

response 82 of 92:

Apr 17 01:48 UTC 1999

I try :)

response 84 of 92:

Apr 18 18:48 UTC 1999

First, determine how popular backtalk is. I, for one, don't use it.

response 86 of 92:

Apr 19 13:53 UTC 1999

Re resp:84 - I, for one, use Backtalk a lot, so it's popular with me.
:)  Usage levels could probably be synthesized from the http logs. I 
don't know if Backtalk keeps its own usage log.

Re resp:85 - Hmm. I'm sure it could be done pretty easily. But it's not 
a feature I'd welcome - too much screen clutter. I assume you want this 
as a reminder of what item you're reading. Something that would serve 
that purpose without cluttering up the item would be to include the 
item name in the <TITLE> container, so that it shows up in the window 
title. That's a feature I've wished for many times - when I'm scrolling 
through a long list of responses, I often forget what the item is 
supposed to be about and would appreciate not having to scroll all the 
way back to the beginning to find out.

response 88 of 92:

Apr 28 16:21 UTC 1999

Putting the item item in the <TITLE> is a little harder than it sounds.
When the interface uses frames, the outer window is generated by a
script that doesn't know the items title.  It could get it, but it would
take a non-trivial amount of extra processing to do so.  In non-frame
mode it would be easier.  This is something that's been on my To-Do list
for a while, but it's frankly a bother.

response 90 of 92:

Apr 30 01:29 UTC 1999

I did a little digging on usage levels of Backtalk.

This is based on usage during the week of Apr 18 - Apr 24 (7 days).

Here is number of web hits:

        TOTAL               67164
        BACKTALK            10780
          pistachio         10058
          peek                309
          front page          305
          vanilla             108

This makes it looks like backtalk is about 1/6 of our web traffic, but I
some of the other 67164 hits are due to backtalk too - button image fetchs -
so it is probably higher than that.  I only counted hits on the actual CGI
program.

Obviously the vast amount of Backtalk traffic is in the pistachio interface.
Peek is an interface used for putting links into the conferences onto other
web pages.  Most of those 309 hits seem to have been off the links on our
home page.

Here are some numbers on specific types of actions:

                        pistachio  vanilla   peek  BACKTALK  PICOSPAN   TOTAL
ITEMS READ                6791       12        24   6827
ITEMS READ ANONYMOUSLY     158        4        24    186
RESPONSES POSTED           332        0         0    332      878       1210
ITEMS POSTED                18        1         0     19        9         28

The Backtalk numbers are from the httpd logs.  The TOTAL number was arrived
by scanning the conferences counting items and responses posted in that
time window.  That program had the bug that it was double counting responses
in linked items, so the total number is probably somewhat inflated.  The
Picospan numbers are just the total numbers minus the Backtalk numbers (which
means they got all the double-counts).  There is probably no way to tell how
many items were read with Picospan.  It's hard to draw conclusions from this,
but you might guesss that about 1/4 to 1/3 of all conferencing is done with
Backtalk.

The Backtalk numbers for items read may be inflated - I think I could have
double or triple counted items for people who read with frames on.  So I
did kind of a crappy job with this data.  Sorry.  I have a wiggling baby on
my lap.

Note that there is some anonymous reading going on, but it is a pretty small
fraction of the total - an average of about 22 items a day.

There were 50 different users who had more than 10 backtalk web hits in that
week.  The ones with more than 100 are:

   1964 md
   1001 toking
    747 senna
    746 jep
    485 remmers
    382 hhsrat
    367 flem
    366 danr
    317 hematite
    249 gregb
    247 beeswing
    196 maeve
    196 little1
    171 jiffer
    161 bdh1
    152 ryan
    134 larsn
    132 atticus
    128 other
    127 arthurp

Again, people who have frames on may (or may not) be overcounted in this list.
It's hard to believe Michael looked at two-thousand backtalk pages in one week.

response 92 of 92:

May 3 01:11 UTC 1999

382.  Well, now I know that I read an average of 54 backtalk pages per 
day, which is only about 2 per hour, and only .03 per minute.  But, if 
you figure most of my grex time is about 20 hours per week, that's an 
average of 19 "pages" an hour, or .31 "pages" per minute.

These stats are kind of fun.  :)