M-Net / Grex Message By: Jan Wolter (janc_CW) 7/26/98 10:51:13 AM A few bits of news on Grex: - We've been getting lots of new users. On the average day, we get 175 people signing up for new accounts. Last Saturday we had 250 new users, a new record. We keep breaking our records though. Grex now has about 24,000 users. At the current rate of growth, we expect to exceed 64K users sometime next summer. This has our Unix gurus worried because most versions of Unix, including ours, go cross-eyed at the concept of more than 64K users. - In spite of this vast growth in users, the new machine is holding up pretty well. Most of the time, the machine is still pretty zippy. - Vandals seem to be holding steady at about 0.5% to 1% of the users. Unfortunately, that means we get one or two new vandals attacking the system every day. Luckily, the vast majority are morons (who else would attack a free system?). Security has held well so far, and we've been able to survive most denial-of-service attacks. If Grex is slow these days, it's usually because a mail bomb or fork bomb attack is in progress. If it's down, then it's either an especially nasty fork bomb or a power outage. - Finances are OK, but not great. Membership hasn't been growing anywhere near as fast as usership, and we are reaching the point where our income only covers our operating expenses, leaving nothing for improvements and upgrades. We are planning to start getting a bit more aggressive about asking for donations. After people have been on Grex for three months, they will get E-mail asking them if they might like to donate some money. - Grex was originally constituted to be a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation, but in the first 6 years of its existance, nobody ever filed the (somewhat daunting) paperwork with the IRS. I did this a few months ago, and we have now been formally granted tax-exempt status. Among other things, this means we won't have to pay tax on the phone bills for our 13 dial-in lines, which saves us $30 a month, which is enough to tip us back into the black for a while. Next step - go through a similar process to see if we can avoid Ann Arbor city property taxes. - We did some redesign on our web page, at http://www.cyberspace.org to make it a bit more attractive and informative. Still very low-tech. It looks like the basic question we have to answer is not "can we survive?" but "how big do we want to get?" None of our volunteer staff and board members are all that eager to keep growing, but the only way to slow growth would be to make our service in some way less attractive to some segment of our user base. We've worked hard to make it good. Making it less good isn't our idea of fun either. Our best chance is if more people start more good free services - we need more competition.

I keep trying...