A couple more things.

I used the term "conference" without explaining it. Conferences are groups of topics; topics are chronological sequences of posts.

Also I forgot to mention that there are some read-only preview conferences that are accessible without membership. Inkwell, for example, has frequent interviews with book authors, many of them Well members.

Oh, and tell 'em "biscuit" sent you.

Edited by author 03-16-2004 07:47 PM
i was a well member for a year, recently, and logged in maybe 10 times. i used the salon premium membership a lot more.

my real problem with the well is the interface - i fully understand the historical weight of the terminal interface (and actually think that half is quite decent) but why does Engaged (the cgi one - probably as old as the CGI definition itself) have to suck so much? it's really very bad.

all of that said, i would definitely throw them $2 for the 2 month trial, because there's a lot of excellent stuff in there.

Yeah. Engaged was worked on pretty heavily in 1996 and 1997, and has sort of languished since then. The Picospan basis (that's the ssh/telnet interface) makes web interface development more difficult and compromised than it would be otherwise. And as you noted, Picospan is actually pretty good! So we are loath to discard it.

Once you settle in, the interface issues definitely recede.

Good point also about the Salon Premium perk -- I forgot to mention that.

yeah, i'm sure it would take a lot of serious hacking. engaged's functionality is fine, the presentation layer just bothers me. i don't regret giving the well a year's membership fee, and would've probably renewed, if i had had the discretionary budget at the time.

And yeah, I should also point out - the existing denizens of the well overall try very hard to get new users invovled, and certainly for someone who actually participates in discussion, the interface issues will evaporate quickly. it's harder on lurkers.

Just wanted to post that this offer has been extended to April 4th, for anybody who was on the fence but missed the original deadline.