tfurrows wrote about his perception of grex and SDF being more
frequently unavailable compared to his other gopher servers, which I
won't argue with because:
i) I have no experience of grex, and
ii) plenty of complaints about SDF
so I'm going to keep my mouth shut about that. However, he seems to
feel that his perception as a user isn't really a valid metric for
comparing systems.
I'm afraid I'm going to disagree (sorry). It seems to me that the
single most important attribute of a communal facility is that it is
available for the community it purports to serve. And so, (besides
things like hard numbers on uptimes etc.) the perception of the
service in the eyes of its users *is* an important (albeit difficult
to measure) metric. If your pubnix isn't serving its users, it isn't
fulfilling its prime function.
The usual argument against this sort of expectation runs along the
'oh, but I'm doing it in my free time/out of my own pocket/etc.'
lines, which is a cop-out. If you've made a commitment to run a
service, then it's not unreasonable for your users to expect
a certain level of continued interest and involvement on your part.
Maybe I'm making too much out of a couple of lines in a phlog, but
neglecting the actual users of a service is something IT is guilty of
all too often. tfurrows dismisses his own feelings about the services
he's using, even though they are reasonable and valid, and any
sysadmin worth their salt should be willing to listen.
Please note that no criticism of tfurrows is intended or implied. It
just struck me that he seemed to be throwing doubt on his own
experience as a user, which in the end is surely the only meaningful
measurement of the utility of *any* computer system.
