To Web-Walkers list:
Summary of October 18 Web-Walkers meeting on electronic discussion groups.
For each upcoming conference, he puts a proposed program in one frame and provides space for discussion right underneath it. For examples, see his home page at http://sunsite.unc.edu/ucis/btl4/. At the bottom of the page under Work In Progress, select one of the events. In the top frame, you see the program; you can scroll through the text on that frame. In the bottom frame, people can suggest changes and make comments. Again, you can scroll through the text at the bottom. You can change the size of the frames by dragging the dividing line between the frames. This is a particularly effective way to discuss the content of a particular page.
After the conference, the discussion frame is removed and the page is enhanced with additional links and information from the conference. It then becomes a historical document in the Center's Web; see, for example, http://sunsite.unc.edu/ucis/secondary/FSU/FSU.html
MHonArc: Larry is using MHonArc (a Perl mail-to-HTML converter) for a couple of discussion groups, such as http://sunsite.unc.edu/piedmont/forums/top/maillist.html. MHonArc converts URLS within messages to hyperlinks so they can be selected, and it provides mail archiving with index and mail thread linking.
Larry says that MHonARC works best when done with procmail, a mail filter. You tell procmail to look for anything coming to a particular e-mail alias. You could run a cron job to reset the file and archives.
Hypermail: Hypermail is a program that takes a file of mail messages in UNIX mailbox format and generates a set of cross-reference HTML documents. Hypermail converts URLS within messages to hyperlinks so they can be selected. Archives generated by Hypermail can be incrementally updated. For an example, see http://sunsite.unc.edu/london/permaculture/mailarchives/discussion-threads/soil-quality. You can sort the messages by date, subject, or author.
HyperNews: Although he hasn't used it yet, Larry thinks that HyperNews may be the best non-email, non-newsgroup software. HyperNews does not use the NNTP News mechanism for transferring articles between sites nor is there a gateway to News (yet). Unlike news, articles and responses never expire (at least not now) and they may be edited any time after being "posted". You can designate groups and sysops. Although HyperNews does not appear to interface with standard newsgroups, you could pipe them in.
Matt's WWWBoard: While Matt's work is very good, it is designed for only one topic.
News Gate: There is something called a news gate that will mail messages posted to a newsgroup to an e-mail id.
Searching: Some search engines (like excite) will search newsgroups as well as web pages. Newsgroup archives are really just another type of page to be indexed.
Roger has a paper online at http://bongo.oit.unc.edu/~akers/Forums.html
There currently are two pieces of software in use on campus; one was used for initial testing; a newer product combines modules of Virginia Commonwealth University's Web Course in a Box with modules created at UNC-CH to provides additional features. It uses a heavily modified version of Matt's WWWBoard. An archive option has been added to allow participants to pull the whole discussion for the forum into one file for printing.
The instructor can delete individual messages or an entire thread. (The instructor's login has special privileges.)
Messages can be posted anonymously.
For an example (using the old software), see http://bongo.oit.unc.edu/Informatics/ . This discussion has 13 experts from around the globe and a class from Washington State participating. Participants can select a topic to comment on. It uses Hypermail, and it has automatic archiving.
For an example using the new software, see http://bongo.oit.unc.edu:6080/wcb/schools/5/3420/kthomas/web12961/forums/forum1/wwwboard.html
Forums can be open or restricted. If restricted, a single class id and password is used; special options for instructor's allow for changing the user id and password.
A web page, which requires a userid and password, can be used to create new forums. Authorized instructors can create their own forums without having to contact system administrators.
The course discussions are integrated with other Internet services. For example, a button on the discussion page will take you to the home page for the course. Similarly, instead of students having to check the discussion page to see if anything is happening, the software sends to the listserv for the class a daily notification containing a summary of messages posted.
These forums facilitate discussion of papers. The papers can be uploaded. Facilities Roger is currently working on will allow you to download a paper into the software you want to use; conversion is done on the fly! You'd just click on the file in the forum to select and convert it.
It is not yet clear whether UNC-CH can distribute this software, since some of the work came from Virginia Commonwealth University. Roger's code is all in perl.