[Coco] Experimental COCO forum.

[John E. Malmberg]

Independent of Dennis's setup here, I started a project back in June.

It was plagued by bad luck.

First my broadband supplier did an unannounced update 11 days before I 
went on trip, and had not figured out how to get the cable network 
connected to the internet before I had to leave.

Then right after that the motherboard in my computer failed.  It was 
covered under warrantee, but the third party harddrive failed right 
after that.  And now this week, the 9 GB IDE system disk failed, so I am 
running off the backup drive until I can pull the dead one out.


But back to my topic:

What I was set up a gateway from bit.listserv.coco to a group conference 
tool known as NOTES.  (Not in any way related to Lotus Notes).

It is tracking the threads that have been posted since about July.

I had originally planned to make it bi-directional, where postings could 
be made from the Notes conference into the newsgroup, but since Dennis 
has setup this mailing list, I may stop work on this and eventually shut 
it down.

It is hosted on Encompasserve.org, which is a computer system run by 
computer system professionals as a hobby service to other computer 
professionals.

It needs a VT100 terminal emulator or better to access it, and it needs 
the [delete] key that is used to do a backspace delete, to send a real 
delete code, not a backspace.

For those that do not have a real VT emulator, I have discovered a free 
one at: http://home.planet.nl/~ruurdb/IVT.HTM

Some interesting statistics have shown up.  From June, there have been 
about 75 threads running.

There are approximately 84 different posting addresses used for on-topic 
posts.  I am not keeping track of posts per user.

If you would like to be able to look over the postings from 
bit.listserv.coco organized by threads, then you might want to check it 
out.  These are being updated in 15 minute intervals by a moderator 
program that has a pretty good idea on how to identify the on-topic posters.

In the last 72 hours that I have let the moderator program run on it's 
own, it looks like it has gotten everything right, and in the evening 
there have been no real posts waiting for manual approval.

The NOTES program allows you to easily read the updated topics through a 
TELNET session.

You need to read the rules at http://encompasserve.org and then follow 
the instructions to sign up.

Then add the COLOR_COMPUTER conference to your NOTES notebook.

If this conference is useful, I will leave it up.  Encompasserve let me 
set it up as an experiment as they are interested in that type of 
gateway for some of their other conferences.


Encompasserve is a timesharing computer system running OpenVMS that will 
give out free "shell" accounts with TELNET, FTP and WWW access, with 
e-mail addresses that are relatively safe to give out in public with out 
being totally drowned in spam.  E-mail to those addresses can be 
forwarded to your other e-mail accounts, or you can access the e-mail 
from IMAP, or TELNET.

This FTP and WWW access makes it useful to use for colaborating on group 
projects that are smaller than what sourceforge would be interested in.


While Encompasserve is free, it may eventually need to pass the hat for 
contributions to cover it's operational costs.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
Malmberg at encompasserve.org
Personal Opinion Only