From owner-drosophila@net.bio.net Sun Dec 10 22:00:00 1995 Path: biosci!NET.BIO.NET!biosci-help From: biosci-help@NET.BIO.NET (BIOSCI Administrator) Newsgroups: bionet.drosophila Subject: *IMPORTANT* New BIOSCI WWW Service!! Date: 10 Dec 1995 23:12:28 -0800 Organization: BIOSCI International Newsgroups for Molecular Biology Lines: 84 Sender: daemon@net.bio.net Distribution: world Message-ID: Reply-To: biosci-help@net.bio.net NNTP-Posting-Host: net.bio.net I am extremely pleased to announce that BIOSCI is now providing WWW access to all bionet newsgroups through its Web site at www.bio.net!!! To use this service connect to our URL http://www.bio.net and then click on the "Access the BIOSCI/bionet Newsgroups" hyperlink. David Mack, the BIOSCI systems administrator at the U.S. BIOSCI node, has done an excellent job using the hypermail program from Enterprise Integration Technologies to make both current and archived BIOSCI messages available through the World Wide Web. Hypermail converts all e-mail addresses in the messages to mailto: URLs. As long as your Web browser is correctly configured to send e-mail, you can not only read these messages, you can also send either public replies to the newsgroup posting address (present on each message To: line) or private replies to the poster (address on each message's From: line). By selecting the appropriate browser option, you may also be able to include text in your reply from the message to which you are responding. The hypermail archive message headers are threaded by default, but messages can also be displayed chronologically or sorted by author or subject line. This capability gives you, in effect, a threaded newsreader through the Web. All messages posted to the lists are still distributed by e-mail and USENET as usual. However they are now also added to the hypermail archives typically within 20 minutes of posting (a delay was added to avoid file locking problems during periods of heavy use). The new hypermail archive gives you the advantages of USENET without requiring a local news server!! You can keep your personal mail file uncluttered now by using this system instead of e-mail. If you have had problems in the past with new bionet groups not getting established in your local USENET news system, weep no more!! The latest messages will always be here at net.bio.net and all you will need is your Web browser to read and/or post to any of the newsgroups. We will also soon be offering far more WAIS indexes as you will see from browsing the new system. Our goal is to provide, in addition to our current system-wide BIOSCI index, individual indexes for each newsgroup! Although we have done extensive testing, we will not be surprised if users discover some remaining bugs in the system. Please report any problems to us at biosci-help@net.bio.net This new archive also opens up the possibility of sponsorships for individual newsgroups. If your organization is interested in helping support our work through advertising in these WWW forums, i.e., displaying your logo - broadcast ads are not allowed, please contact us at biosci-help@net.bio.net. This is one of the most exciting developments at BIOSCI in quite some time. I want to thank David Mack for all of his hard work getting this system up and running. This entailed many late nights and weekends of effort to configure our system properly. I would also like to thank David States at Washington University for calling this program to our attention several months ago. We had looked at other software for providing Web access to our services and like this one the best. Hypermail was developed by Tom Gruber for Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) and later rewritten in C by Kevin Hughes at EIT. It is available for free from EIT. I am also pleased to announce that we have recently developed other software here that makes newsgroup moderation very easy compared to the old methods. We continue to encourage the discussion leaders of the low-to-moderate volume newsgroups to consider moderation to protect your readers against Internet ad spams. Please contact us for details on implementing this. Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson BIOSCI/bionet Manager biosci-help@net.bio.net .