• Re: suitable echos and ho

    From NANCY BACKUS@1:123/140 to AUGUST ABOLINS on Tue Nov 12 15:41:00 2019
    Quoting August Abolins to Sean Dennis on 11-07-19 21:23 <=-

    Yep.. Janis's report is great! I've extolled its virtues in the past. Decker's HPT Daily Report in the STATS echo is pretty good too,
    actually. I assume the list ignores the echos with zero traffic to
    show only active echos for the day. That keeps the clutter down very nicely.

    It's a least a good starting point...

    However, my whole concern is how is a user or non-sysop supposed to
    know what echos are worth participating in.
    "Hello User! Now that you have accessed the Fidonet echos, watch FIDOGAZETTE and STATS echos for clues to which echos are available.
    We leave it up to you to figure out which ones have merely robotic
    content and which ones strike up conversations with actual people".
    :(

    My experience has been that there aren't really all that many echoes
    that I have enough interest in to check out, so it doesn't really take
    long to figure out which are robotic and which are real people...

    This is why I thought the 5-step method with the "FIDONET ECHO
    ACTIVITY TOOL" I put together at: http://kolico.ca/fidonet/echos/future4fido/
    ...could help, better. The user can narrow down an echo of recent activity by noting the last post date, and take a sneak peak at the content.

    That could be useful... :)

    It's too bad those Sychronet sites don't display the short/official
    echo names. Without it, there is another layer of obfuscation for
    the user to decode.
    As an example, instead of just this:
    The Cats_Meow Sanity Check Echo | 134 | Oct-26-19 17:54
    Commodore Computer Conference | 426 | Oct-27-19 22:03
    Commercial for Sale Echo | 1 | Dec-09-18 23:53
    Classic Computers | 204 | Oct-30-19 10:26
    Gossip and chit-chat echo | 101 | Jul-07-19 09:17
    An extra column for the official echo name would unify the environment across the many other systems better:
    CATS_MEOW : The Cats_Meow Sanity Check Echo| 134 | Oct-26-19 17:54 CBM : Commodore Computer Conference | 426 | Oct-27-19 22:03 CFORSALE : Commercial for Sale Echo | 1 | Dec-09-18 23:53 CLASSIC_COMPUTER: Classic Computers | 204 | Oct-30-19 10:26 COFFEE_KLATSCH : Gossip and chit-chat echo | 101 | Jul-07-19 09:17

    That's pretty much something that the bbs software sets up... In my experience, having gone to many different bbses with all sorts of
    different softwares over many years, some will have the official echo
    tag along with an explanation, some only the official tag, and others
    only the explanation (which as you've found sometimes isn't all that helpful)...

    For a sysop, decoding tables and stats is a no brainer. But I am approaching this dilema from a first timer's exposure to retro-net <g> Hence my imagining a server database of sorts that identifies active
    echos on a minimum of key hub systems on one screen display.

    A first-timer's exposure at this stage of the game quite naturally could
    be overwhelming, granted.... Back in the day, there were many times more
    echoes available, most of which were actually quite active, so whatever
    your interest, you probably could find a dozen or more at least that
    would catch your fancy... which was a different sort of overwhelming...
    Now, some of the bigger ones are long gone (such as the one that
    originally snagged me into bbsing, GENEALOGY), and others still hang in,
    with much smaller populations, but still have a following.... like
    MEMORIES and COOKING, and others... :)

    ttyl neb

    ... All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt

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