PEG and Xenophobia

[Crittar]

I have just been reading through the e-mails imported from PEG. Once again they seem to be 'up in arms' about ProgressTalk 'stealing' their posts (this despite the fact that any one of us could join PEG if we were so inclined).

Does anyone know why PEG is so insular and seems to be afraid of information exchange?

Surely extending the number of places where an answer might be obtained is to the benefit of the whole community?

Anyone who is a member of PEG has the opportunity to also join ProgressTalk to check if answers have been posted here and, if the manager at PEG was willing to talk to Chris Schreiber, I'm sure some form of reciprocal transfer could be set up.

 

[MurrayH]

'stealing' ?? How about borrowing forever?

 

[Crittar]

Murray,

Whether you call it 'borrowing forver' or 'stealing' (which, at the end of the day, is just a matter of semantics) is irrelevant, either term implies a loss.

The point the Peggers seem to be missing is that by widening the audience they have a greater potential of reaching someone who knows the answer. IMHO that would be a mutual gain.

I beleive that the aim of PEG and of ProgressTalk is to share knowledge amongst the Progress community. Does the fact that PEG emails are imported here prevent that? NO.

I, for one, would have no objection if a Pegger logged on to ProgressTalk, found an answer to his question, and posted the answer on PEG. If I didn't want to help people (and gain their help) then I wouldn't belong to this forum in the first place.

I must confess: The only reason I opened this thread is because the Peggers attitude "If you don't play by my rules I'm taking my ball home" frequently annoys me.

 

[bendaluz2]

and me

 

[Chris Kelleher]

Thanks for your comments guys! As you've probably noticed, this topic usually appears every few months, either on the PEG email lists or the comp.databases.progress news group. Up until now I usually stay out of these discussions, as I am tired of the debate as well and know that my comments will not influence the few very vocal peggers that think I am the devil himself.

I also realize that many people use ProgressTalk.com and find this site very helpful, and am thankful for that. Right now we have over 4,200 registered users and are averaging about 500 posts each month, or about 25 on the average work day. This is about 15-20% of the number of messages that appear on PEG. Also, in reviewing November's web site statistics, we had 51.612 visitors during the month viewing over 670,000 pages. This is probably more web traffic then all other Progress related sites combined, with exception of peg.com and progress.com.

I was a PEG member since around 1993 or 94, and was one of the first paid members when they started asking for membership fees to help run the site. I decided to started ProgressTalk.com back in 1999 for many reasons, the main one being a lack of any type of a searchable archive of the PEG.

It was annoying to see the same questions and answers coming up constantly, and most PEG members would ask about creating a searchable archive on a regular basis. Even though there was a big demand for this feature, nothing ever seemed to be said about implementing it, other then saying it was a good idea and it was being worked on.

I also highly preferred web-based discussion forums over email, because of all the advantages this format brings with it, like not having to deal with organizing and reading alot of email, and having discussions contained inside of a thread, where it is much easier to follow and review, and being able to have more forums to help keep things better organized.

I certainly wasn't the first person to create a searchable PEG archive either. I know of at least one person and one user group which both maintained a public archive for short periods of time. Both sites were closed down by the owners after receiving pressure from a few people in the PEG community.

When I started ProgressTalk.com, I also got pressure from a few people asking me outright to shut the site down. One person even had his lawyer write a threatening letter.

So why do I mirror PEG email posts here at all? Because there are many very valuable discussions that take place there, and they deserve to be seen and read by as many people in the Progress community as possible. I (and I'm sure many other ProgressTalk users) still actively read PEG discussions, however I prefer to do it on the web site over email.

A few people have made the argument I am "stealing" content, or "hiding" the original source of the messages. Almost all good online discussion groups that I know of and follow are mirrored to multiple locations, including email, USENET or private news servers, and web interfaces. There are also services like DejaNews and others that are dedicated to providing archiving and reading of online discussion groups. Even Progress Software has both a news and web interface to all PEG messages.

As for the comment I am trying to hide the original source of the messages, I've recently created a new PEG category where all PEG messages are stored, to make the origin of the message much more clear. PEG messages are also excluded from the new daily topics list, while still open for reading and searching.

Another final thing you might want to consider is that the PEG is a business, and that the ProgressTalk.com is offered completely free of charge, even for job / resume postings. I've invested my money into starting and running ProgressTalk and don't expect anything in return for it other then to have people find it helpful.

I bought a dedicated Dell PowerEdge 1650, with Dual P-III CPUs, 1GB of RAM and 54GB total SCSI disk space to power this site for about $3,500. I also pay $35/month for co-location rack space and about $150 month for an average of 50GB of bandwidth each month.

Yes, there are banner ads running at the top of the pages, but the majority of them were provided free of charge. The few paid banners that are advertising Progress related products don't even come close to covering the monthly bandwidth costs... however breaking even with my costs are were never a goal nor will it even be an issue.

PEG currently has what I would image a very similar, if maybe slightly higher, monthly cost structure. However, each and every job posting email, which averages about 15-20 a month, costs $60 each. Also, they have voluntary membership fees for $45/year per person, with I'm sure several hundred paid members.

Hopefully this will at least explain my feelings and motivation, and of course people have the right to disagree with me... but then again, I'm not going to let that influence what I do.

Thanks for listening and your support!

Chris Schreiber
ProgressTalk.com Administrator

 

[Crittar]

Chris,

I think you do a superb job and find ProgressTalk to be a very useful and user friendly site.

Anyone from PEG who took the time to log in would immediately see that any imports from PEG ARE fully attributed to PEG.

As my original comment said: Who loses by information and help being more widespread?

Also: Do they fear that the competition is going to put them out of business? Doesn't it say something about their mindset if they regard ProgressTalk as competition rather than another resource?

Keep up the good work Chris! I, for one, appreciate it.

 

[Crittar]

Chris,

Is there any way that when posts are imported from peg an email address for replies could be copied over?

That way as well as posting a reply on here we could email the same reply to the originator.

I am in favour of sharing knowledge in any way possible (and also in favour of stamping out xenophobia )

By sending replies in that way we might perhaps encourage a few of the Peggers to check out the facts on ProgressTalk before they make inaccurate comments (anyone wanting to see the sort of comments I mean only needs to check out the CLEARLY MARKED PEG posts on ProgressTalk).

 

[Chris Kelleher]

Originally posted by Crittar
Is there any way that when posts are imported from peg an email address for replies could be copied over?

I'm not sure if this is possible, nor would I want to display an email address as it could be picked up by spam-bots.

By sending replies in that way we might perhaps encourage a few of the Peggers to check out the facts on ProgressTalk before they make inaccurate comments (anyone wanting to see the sort of comments I mean only needs to check out the CLEARLY MARKED PEG posts on ProgressTalk).

Well I thought they were clearly marked, being in their own category and everything. But to make it even more clear that they are PEG message, I put a huge message at the top of all the pages in the PEG category saying that they were imported from PEG and linking back to that site.

 

[bino]

Chris,

I too think your doing a great job and service to the Progress community with Progresstalk. Its about sharing information and getting information out to a larger audience. When I was new to Progress and the community I was shocked at the minimal amount of information available related to developing with Progress and specifically webspeed.

The Peg was helpful, but a simple mailing list? come on.

Progresstalk is the only robust <b>message board</b> that was available for anything related to Progress using a modern web based forum.

Keep it up. I just wished we could see such an implementation actually using Progress products, you know a forum like this running of webspeed and Progress. but I understand the cost to run webspeed is limiting. Progress there is a reason why PHP and yes ASP are so prevelant.

 

[bendaluz2]

Chris,
Could you not provide a button to allow a message to be emailed to the PEG user in the same way that you can to other Progresstalk members, i.e. the email address is never shown. A lot of the time the email address usually appears in the body of the message anyway, im sure a bot could pick these up if so desired, maybe you should screen them out.

 

[Petr Vavrinec]

Chris,

I just want you to know that today's discussion on PEG about ProgressTalk made me to come here and registrate. It's just beyond me, how some PEGgers could, on one hand, complain about the famous `Progress Who?' syndrome, and on the other hand actively try to stop the information from spreading.

Thanks for your effort.

 

[MurrayH]

Yeah - rock on ProgressTalk - at least I don't get 300+ e-mails a day in my inbox and my network guys don't yell at me anymore

Murray

 

[mnewnham]

Speaking as someone who posts replies more than asking questions on peg, and indeed, progresstalk, These are some observations:

As someone involved in cross-disciplinary work, I find email groups are a much more efficient way of delivering, filtering out unwanted information and responding to queries. For instance, I subscribe to 4 peg lists. 2 php lists, 1 mysql list, 2 linux lists etc etc. If I had to go to a web site for every one I would spend half my day surfing between sites. For that reason, I find progresstalk more of a hindrance than a help. The only criticism I would make of peg is the lack of searchable archives.

Another observation is that for many other environments. email / newsgroups are the preferred method of communication, and are still the only method of communication for those subject to restrictive internet surfing policies.

Tighter 2-way integration with peg can only help the progress community. The one way traffic as it stands can only "factionilize", and the people who need access to experts are the only losers.

 

[MurrayH]

Yes e-mail is great for all that - but you need to offset against the network overhead it produces. In a company of 170+, many of whom subscribe to the peg, that is a LOT of e-mails.

Murray

 

[bino]

Why on earth would you want to receive every single post on a topic via email. besides the network admin yelling about the traffic, I'd rather hit the site and search on the question when needed as opposed to getting every single email submission on a topic. The boards centralized area for posting and retreiving archive info, not my inbox.

Originally posted by mnewnham
Speaking as someone who posts replies more than asking questions on peg, and indeed, progresstalk, These are some observations:

As someone involved in cross-disciplinary work, I find email groups are a much more efficient way of delivering, filtering out unwanted information and responding to queries. For instance, I subscribe to 4 peg lists. 2 php lists, 1 mysql list, 2 linux lists etc etc. If I had to go to a web site for every one I would spend half my day surfing between sites. For that reason, I find progresstalk more of a hindrance than a help. The only criticism I would make of peg is the lack of searchable archives.

Another observation is that for many other environments. email / newsgroups are the preferred method of communication, and are still the only method of communication for those subject to restrictive internet surfing policies.

Tighter 2-way integration with peg can only help the progress community. The one way traffic as it stands can only "factionilize", and the people who need access to experts are the only losers.

 

[Crittar]

Chris,

I like the idea that Bandaluz2 came up with:

Chris,
Could you not provide a button to allow a message to be emailed to the PEG user in the same way that you can to other Progresstalk members, i.e. the email address is never shown.

This would get around the problem with bots and would allow us to respond to PEG posts.


mnewnham,

If email is your preffered method for accessing / replying to quries then, as you say, PEG is ideal for you. As you can see from the replies here, that is not the case for everyone. I know that during the time I spent registered at PEG I found it unworkable for me. But I certainly found the information there useful. It's simply the the presentation here suits my needs much better.

That doesn't mean that I feel PEG shouldn't exist, neither does it mean that I think PEG shouldn't have access to the information on ProgressTalk.

I believe that the information SHOULD be shared and personally would love to see two way traffic between the two forums.

I just find it incredibly difficult to get my head round the attitude that says ProgressTalk is stealing the information when, as individuals, we could if we so chose, join PEG and access the information anyway. What's the difference other than a desire for a presentation which better suits us?

 

[Norman Biggar]

Chris (Crittar),
I would warn you that I supplied an answer directly by email to a PEG-imported thread (the originator included his e-mail).

After the briefest of Thank-yous, the rest of the replies (yes, more than one) amounted to the same accusations of ProgressTalk stealing posts.

I'm not that sure that certain Peggers would welcome our input. At the risk of sounding "xenophobic", don't rattle their cages.

 

[Crittar]

Norman,

I'm sure you are right that there are certain peggers who would not welcome our input.

I'm also sure that the majority would behave like responsible adults and welcome any pertinent input.

I'm convinced that it is only a small minority (albeit a vocal one) of peggers who would like to see ProgressTalk and anyone associated with it wiped from the face of the earth.

Of course I could be wrong - it wouldn't be the first time. Anyone (from ANY forum) please feel free to correct me if you think I am mistaken.

 

[Marian EDU]

Hi guys,

I was recently banned on PEG because they accuse me for making publicity to one "open-source" project on member's expense. I'm as puzzles as you are about this attitude manifested by Peg members, but honestly they can do what they want on their mailing list.

When I see the posts that they come with it make me really sick; statements like: "*reproduction on ProgressTalk forums is a violation of copyright*", "One World -- One PEG" say everything about the poster itself. There are people in progress community that don't agree with this bizarre idea and don't see any concurrence going on between Peg and ProgressTalk or any other web-site, mailing list or news system that serve the progress community.

I will not say that one shouldn't use Peg anymore just because some cocky members show certain intolerance regarding other progress communities; maybe the one that post messages on Peg should consider posting that message also on ProgressTalk.

It will be great if you can make some mailing lists available for subscription, the web interface is great if you want to search something in so called "Knowledge Database" but a mailing list is more "interactive" if I can say that.

You are doing a great job, and my opinion is that progress community can NOT be reduced to Peg as they mistakenly thing.

Best regards,
Marian EDU.

 

[Chris Kelleher]

Originally posted by bino
I too think your doing a great job and service to the Progress community with Progresstalk. Its about sharing information and getting information out to a larger audience.

Thank you! Yes I agree, that is why I started this site in the first place.

I just wished we could see such an implementation actually using Progress products, you know a forum like this running of webspeed and Progress...

I've considered that, but as you said the costs are one factor, and the development time that would be needed is another. It's still a possibility for the future though