nearly dead group

[cr88192]

for most practical matters this group is nearly dead.
it is filled largely with spam, calls for papers, and occasional
announcements, little real actual user activity.

sad, I remembered when people were actually talking on this group a bit more
(and at the time I was accused of contributing to all the crap here...).

hell, flame on, at least it will show people are still around...

just take note of this date: Friday July 16, 2004, as that is when I am
posting this.

--
cr88192 at hotmail dot com
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bgb-sys/
http://bgb-sys.sourceforge.net/

[David C. DiNucci]

Post by cr88192
for most practical matters this group is nearly dead.
it is filled largely with spam, calls for papers, and occasional
announcements, little real actual user activity.
sad, I remembered when people were actually talking on this group a bit more
(and at the time I was accused of contributing to all the crap here...).
hell, flame on, at least it will show people are still around...
just take note of this date: Friday July 16, 2004, as that is when I am
posting this.

I have considered this myself, but have hesitated to post for a few reasons:
1. The solution to low signal/noise is to increase signal. To the
extent that meta-discussions are themselves not on-topic, they are
noise, and productive only if they generate more signal than that noise.
I'll take a chance that this one will.

2. I had my own ideas for what this group could/should be when I worked
to create it, but in the end, I have no greater or lesser control over
what it is than anyone else, seeing as how it's an unmoderated group.

3. This group passed with hundreds of votes (if memory serves), and
early on there were at least a fair number of posters. I believe that
its generality may be somewhat to blame--i.e. counter-intuitively the
more topics we accomodate, the less posts there are. When someone
enters a big empty room, they will often just leave a find a smaller one
with one or two like-minded people instead of hoping that enough of them
will eventually enter to make the room interesting. Result: Without
effort to fill the room, critical mass never develops. Creating
subgroups is premature without traffic here in the first place, but the
creation of virtual subgroups (using subject prefixes) is a potential
way to address this.

4. I believe that even this "nearly dead" group is much more alive that
many "really dead" groups. Many readers might also not realize that the
number of usenet providers carrying the group is still increasing (last
I looked).

5. As for spam, the only known remedies I know of are (a) to moderate
the group, and (b) to ignore the spam. The proponents had very good
reasons to believe that moderation would be a mistake for this group
(contrary to some advice), and I trust that most people have already
developed skills and/or tools to help them ignore spam.

I'll follow this with some "almost signal" to hopefully counterbalance
this noise.

-Dave
-----------------------------------------------------------------
David C. DiNucci Elepar Tools for portable grid,
***@elepar.com http://www.elepar.com parallel, distributed, &
503-439-9431 Beaverton, OR 97006 peer-to-peer computing

[cr88192]

Post by David C. DiNucci

Post by cr88192
for most practical matters this group is nearly dead.
it is filled largely with spam, calls for papers, and occasional
announcements, little real actual user activity.
sad, I remembered when people were actually talking on this group a bit more
(and at the time I was accused of contributing to all the crap here...).
hell, flame on, at least it will show people are still around...
just take note of this date: Friday July 16, 2004, as that is when I am
posting this.

1. The solution to low signal/noise is to increase signal. To the
extent that meta-discussions are themselves not on-topic, they are
noise, and productive only if they generate more signal than that noise.
I'll take a chance that this one will.

yes, however, my oppinion is that actual conversations, whether or not they
are strictly on topic, may help here...

Post by David C. DiNucci
2. I had my own ideas for what this group could/should be when I worked
to create it, but in the end, I have no greater or lesser control over
what it is than anyone else, seeing as how it's an unmoderated group.

yes.

Post by David C. DiNucci
3. This group passed with hundreds of votes (if memory serves), and
early on there were at least a fair number of posters. I believe that
its generality may be somewhat to blame--i.e. counter-intuitively the
more topics we accomodate, the less posts there are. When someone
enters a big empty room, they will often just leave a find a smaller one
with one or two like-minded people instead of hoping that enough of them
will eventually enter to make the room interesting. Result: Without
effort to fill the room, critical mass never develops. Creating
subgroups is premature without traffic here in the first place, but the
creation of virtual subgroups (using subject prefixes) is a potential
way to address this.

ok.

just I think some forms of distributed computing (primarily those based on
concurrent message passing) are pretty cool, but it is nice to have people
to talk to...

(yes, my interest in rpc has generally petered out, because, even though rpc
can emulate message passing, it is just not as good, and typically lacks
features necessary for a good system...).

the next issue: what to do with it...

Post by David C. DiNucci
4. I believe that even this "nearly dead" group is much more alive that
many "really dead" groups. Many readers might also not realize that the
number of usenet providers carrying the group is still increasing (last
I looked).

yes, a good point. at least it does seriously beat out, eg, alt.lang.design,
in that there are actual posters here sometimes...

more posters would help imo...

Post by David C. DiNucci
5. As for spam, the only known remedies I know of are (a) to moderate
the group, and (b) to ignore the spam. The proponents had very good
reasons to believe that moderation would be a mistake for this group
(contrary to some advice), and I trust that most people have already
developed skills and/or tools to help them ignore spam.
I'll follow this with some "almost signal" to hopefully counterbalance
this noise.

ok.

it is not so much that spam is itself a problem (spam seems fairly evenly
distrubuted over usenet), just it is helpful when there are enough posters
and new subjects to counterbalance it.

[tstrufe]

Hi there,

I don't consider this a dead group.
Ordering the postings of this group as threads I dont see much of the
damn junkmails and being a researcher I'm very happy to see the Calls
for Papers.
At the german unis we have end of the terms at the moment, so quite a
lot to do with exams and corrections, but I'm pretty sure that there
will be more discussions as soon as this unfortunate work is done (and
probably the holidays taken ;-D).
I like this group. I like the discussions, if they take place and I
consider the people reading and writing an interesting crowd.
Keep it up! More discussions when the mind is back on the real job! :)

Thorsten

[cr88192]

Post by tstrufe
Hi there,
I don't consider this a dead group.

I didn't say it was dead, as some people talk sometimes, but it is "nearly
dead", as for the most part posts/threads are few and far between.

Post by tstrufe
Ordering the postings of this grou\s threads I dont see much of the
damn junkmails and being a researcher I'm very happy to see the Calls
for Papers.

here I see lots of spam, though I think it may be because my server doesn't
filter very well...
looking at a different (read only) server, I see a largely different set of
spam.

calls for papers aren't very helpful to me, as I don't have any papers (nor
any creativity for that matter). maybe it is that I am not a "researcher", I
don't know. they are also not really usable threads either.


I leach ideas and I code stuff, apparently comming up with anything is too
much effort. I try to avoid making things weird or unusual (these things can
be stumbling blocks), and as a result, no one gives a crap.

from what I can gather what tends to live on is stuff that exists as mass
conglomerations of "generic stuff" with maybe a few special features (if
any) taked on in a usually unimpressive manner.
no one gives a crap about this though, it is not very interesting.

if one tries to be creative, however, then they may not gain any acceptance
due to things being novel and possibly difficult to understand, but then
people might care, albeit, they will likely never use it for much more than
small amounts of fiddling or mining for ideas.

just as a guess (based on my supreme lack of better understanding), I would
guess, eg, xmpp would be a good base for dc, if anything because it is
highly extensible and fairly general. yes, it may not be very efficient, but
this is an acceptable loss (the other option is making one's own protocol,
which will cost in that there is not existing servers/other
infrastructure/...). the karma system is also pretty lame, making any
"decent volume" use problematic.

I have nothing more than a lame language with lots of kludges and a crappy
message passing system though, which is unimpressive, and for some reason I
have been generally unable to log into sourceforge to update my project
recently. probably not like anyone cares though.

of course, I am stupid anyways so anything I think or say doesn't have any
real baring on anything either...

Post by tstrufe
At the german unis we have end of the terms at the moment, so quite a
lot to do with exams and corrections, but I'm pretty sure that there
will be more discussions as soon as this unfortunate work is done (and
probably the holidays taken ;-D).
I like this group. I like the discussions, if they take place and I
consider the people reading and writing an interesting crowd.
Keep it up! More discussions when the mind is back on the real job! :)

agreed.


in other groups I have been complained at for not sticking to a
question/answer format, others consist of people just writing long posts of
what they are doing/have implemented/..., here it is a lot of calls for
papers and people wanting to talk about theory (but not implementations, and
I have not seen much of any real occurance of question/answer).

it is ammusing, I don't really get it.