Talk:RemoteAccess

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 2006-08-10. The result of the discussion was keep.

[edit] This doesn't really belong here but

For the moment I've aquiesqued on Mroblivious1bmf's request not to post on his talk page, until my request for a third opinion on the matter is resolved. As it's affecting editing of this article, I'm going to have to ask you to stop being paranoid about me hating your or this article. I'm only trying to improve its quality. At the time it was nominated for deletion there were concerns that have since been addressed, and I'm not going to worry about them.

The problem that I'm trying to address(and some other anonymous user was as well) is that external links is being used improperly according to wikipedia standards. Among the relavent points here are that it is generally assumed that users can browse a website, and thus multiple links to pages the same website are unnecessary when the website as a whole addresses the same general subject, and that external links section should be a relatively small portion of the article.

References are a different matter, I'll be working on converting links to references where I can.

From now on, Mroblivious1bmf, please don't accuse me of things I'm not doing(such as using a proxy or attempting to destroy an article or "harrassing" you.) It's a violation of just about every single wikipedia policy regarding user interaction, as well as being plain old not nice. i kan reed 05:21, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External Links disucssion

This is obviously already causing a bit of an edit war, so let's at least talk about it fully. As it stands, the external links are against standards. On most pages, within the external links section, websites are only linked once. On this page, almost all of the links go to subpages of the same site. Typically in these instances, it is common to reduce all such links to one link to the main page. I'm going to let this discussion sit here a couple of days and if no one objects, I'm going to move to that standard, and indicate complaints should be brought to the talk page first. If anyone has any other opinions on the matter, I'd like to hear them. i kan reed 00:32, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Greetings and salutations! Agree that multiple links to the same website are not needed. The BBS Archives are easy enough to navigate for the average punter to be able to find the relevant subsections. (Conflicts of interest: I amalgamated the links yesterday without realising that this was a contentious issue, so apologies!)Mmoneypenny 20:08, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
To my knowledge there was only one objection, and I never quite understood the reasons why. I was merely trying to get some discussion about it. Sadly, the objecter was banned for personal attacks against me, which sure as heck doesn't help determine what the objection is. As such I went ahead and made the changes without waiting the time period, and if anyone changes is back, we can hope they discuss it here. Also, that was a good edit you made. i kan reed 20:14, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] cites needed?

i'm kind of confused about the cites needed... i know they are needed but i'm trying to determine exactly what it is that is needing the cite as well as why? currently i see three cites needed... if i am reading them correctly, they are...

1. the popularity spread of RA
2. RA's technical advancement over QBBS
3. RA's original author loosing interest in RA

do i have these correct?

Wkitty42 17:31, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I was just looking at things that used unclear language, or made claims that seemed specifically hard to back up. Things like: "(andrews) lost interest in further development". That's a claim about motivation I can't find anywhere. It'd just be helpful to verify points like these. The other two citations could be contrued to be matters of opinion and innappropriate in a NPOV context without citations of someone stating that specifically. (for example what defines "very popular" or "more complex"). I'd have made changes to less opinionated statements, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with the particulars to make a correction I can verify. I really don't want to pass work on to other people, but I didn't really see any alternative other than letting the problem sit(and that's no way to improve article quality). i kan reed 06:25, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
well, that helps me to understand it a bit more... i now understand where you are comming from on that aspect... it probably is (or was) easier for those "on the inside" to see these things when they occured... the loss of interest in development by the original author was very apparent to those on the beta team... this due to the lack of responses in the private message area dedicated to the beta team and development of RA... i believe that some of this even showed up in the public message areas in a more subtle fashion... the problem is that the messages in the public areas are long gone, having cycled out during nightly purges... and i'm not sure it the messages in the private beta area can be made public... i know there is at least one "archive" of the beta team's private area that starts in Oct 1995 and comes up to early 2004... the point here is that i don't know how we can cite it... there was also few messages from andrew but again, they were in private...
as for the popularity, others have pointed out in other discussion about the popular magazine of the time, boardwatch, being dead and gone... that's where a lot of cite info would come from... those who were active back in that period could easily see the movement of popularity... there's also the fact that QBBS (QuickBBS by adam hudson) went for a long time without development and that also contributed to folk leaving that package and moving to others... many went to RA due to the similarities and compatibility with their other utilities they were already using...
that brings me to a short note about the bbs list here on wikipedia... in this RA article, there's a link from quickbbs to that list but that list shows a qbbs in the cpm operating system area... i do not believe that this particular qbbs started in the cpm days... but i have no immediate proof of that... the only way to know would be to locate an early copy and read the documentation in it... part of the problem being that quickbbs is/was known by a short name of qbbs... i know that adam hudson was looked on as very innovative when he created the "hudson message base format" that appeared with qbbs when it came out on the market... the HMB was soon implemented by other packages as it was a great improvement on the existing "one message per file" technology of that time... that implementation of the HMB required borland's turbo pascal v3 (IIRC) since it was based on the string data format available in that early pascal compiler... so, there's a bit more work to be done to get many of the lines and strings laid out and untangled... it may be hard to do since so many are also intertwined in several ways... documenting quickbbs will be as hard or harder than documenting RA...
Wkitty42 15:08, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
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