CouncilNet Forum Instructions

Following are the instructions for using HyperNews. If you are already familiar with using HyperNews, advance to the discussion.

Become a Member
Reading Responses
Adding a Response
Submitting Your Response
Deleting Your Response
Notification
CouncilNet Forum Rules

Become a Member

Although anyone may read articles and reponses, there are many reasons for becoming a member. Members are allowed to write responses, delete responses, and move responses. Other benefits of membership and the option to become a member are available on the membership form.

First, you will be asked to create a user ID, which is the identifier that is associated with all the personal information about you. This information includes the following:

• Password (8 character maximum)
• Name (e.g. Joe User)
• Personal URL - your home page.
• E-mail address (e.g. name@domain).
• Optional phone number and snail mail address.
• Preference for format and content of notification messages. (ignored for now)

Your user ID can be the same as your e-mail address, or you can use a shorter nickname, as long is it is not being used by someone else.

Everytime you add a response, you will be asked for your user ID, which will automatically add your name and personal URL to your response. Your name will act as a link to your personal URL and your e-mail address will be a "mailto" URL, allowing other members to contact you directly.

Hypernews will automatically give you a password, but you are encouraged to create a new one to use that is easy to remember. This can be entered in the New Password field. There is no way for HyperNews to tell you your password since it is immediately encrypted, so you will be responsible for remembering it.

Membership is required for writing responses, deleting responses, and moving responses, therefore, you will be requested to enter your User ID and password.

Reading Responses

As stated in the previous section, you do not have to become a member to read responses. Responses appear in an outline format, much like a bulletin board, and there are controls to traverse the responses, add new ones, etc. A response also displays some header lines at the top of the page identifying the context and author of the response. New responses are added chronologically and the newest of the new responses are indentified by a HyperNews generated icon.

There are several ways you can control which responses you see. When you select a response, you will see only the responses to that response (and subresponses). If the responses go deeper than the default maximum outline depth, "..." will appear to indicate more. A chain of responses to a single response, are preceded by "->".

You can use one of several links provided to ease reading of several responses. "Next Response" goes to the next response at the same level, the next one that is responding to the same thing, skipping over any subresponses. If there is no next response, it goes up a level and then finds the next response. "Previous Response" does the same in the opposite direction, but if there is no previous response, it just goes up a level. "Next Thread" goes to the next response one level up. "Next-in-Thread" goes to the next line in the tree of responses, no matter whether that is the first subresponse, a response at the same level, or a response at some higher level thread.

Adding a Response

You can submit responses if your WWW browser supports forms and they will be automatically displayed in the response tree at the end of the article. To respond to an article or response, first make sure the message you want to respond to is displayed, and then just click on the "Respond" link at the bottom of the page.

On the response form, you should provide a title that says something distinctive about what your response is. If you leave the title empty, the title will be "Untitled".

Your response can be just the title if that is all you want to say. If you want to say more, you have to choose one of several formats:

"Paragraph Filled" or "Smart Text" (for version 1.9) means each paragraph, separated from its neighbors by empty lines, will be filled. You can insert line breaks at the end of each line or make it all one long line; either way works. Additionally, the paragraph will be preformatted if any line in a paragraph starts with spaces or tabs, or if every line of a multi-line paragraph starts with the same prefix. Anything that looks like a URL will be made into an anchor. No HTML is allowed. Multiple blank lines are contracted into a single blank line.

"Plain Text" means you can type anything in and it should come out looking that way, whitespace preserved. Please note that if your browser wraps lines for you, you need to insert line breaks yourself.

"HTML" means you have the full power of the Hyper Text Markup Language. This is how you get images embedded in your responses, for example, but you must at least separate paragraphs with <P> or your messages will not be readable. Please try to generate correct HTML since you could otherwise mess up the display of the appended response tree. Do not include the <HEAD> or <BODY> tags, however.

"URL" means you enter just the URL (http only) of a document to use (i.e., http://my.site/my-response.html). The URL may be a full http URL including the server name, or an absolute URL starting with "/". The document that the URL points to is assumed to be HTML, and it must be publically readable, or at least readable from the domain of the server.

Fill in your email address, if there is a space for it. The server may not know your correct address ahead of time.

Uncheck the notify box if you don't want to be notified by email about new responses. See "Notification" below.

Select a "Response Relation" if one is appropriate. The relation might be displayed using an icon.

Submitting Your Response

When you are done editing your response, click the "Preview Response" button. Your response will be shown as it will appear to readers, with a Submit button at the top. If it looks OK, go ahead and Submit it.

If you want to edit your response, use your browser to back up to the previous page with the response form. Reloading the form page will clear out all the entries. You cannot reload the preview page, and do not submit it twice for the same response (neither will do the right thing).

If you decide to not submit your response, simply do not click the Submit button.

After you submit the response, you should be returned to a new version of the page you responded to with your response added at the end. You may need to reload the page if your browser uses the cached copy of the page instead of reloading it for you.

Deleting Your Response

You can delete a response as long as it is one you wrote. First display the page you want to delete, and then click on the "Delete" link at the bottom of the page. You can delete the response by itself or also delete all its responses, if any; select the appropriate box. If there are any responses left after the deletion, the body of your response will be deleted, but there will still be an entry in the tree of responses. This will be removed once the responses are deleted.

Notification

You can be notified by email when any new responses are added to an article or response. This section describes how.

If you are the author of an article or response, and you provided a correct email address, then you are automatically subscribed; you need do nothing. You may explicitly unsubscribe either when you post the response or by using the Notification feature described here.

To subscribe, unsubscribe, or inquire about your subscription status for a particular article or response, first display that article or response. Select the "Notification" link at the bottom of the page.

On this Notification form, first enter your user ID or email address if it is not filled in or not correct. Then you can either change any of your subscription information or inquire about it; select "Change" or "Inquire About" to choose.

The form allows you to change the subscription info for the response you were displaying, or any of its ancestors all the way up to the base article. The title of each response or article is displayed in a list and for each response or article in the list, you can select either "Subscribe", "Unsubscribe" or "Inherit". If you select "Inherit", that means you have not selected either "Subscribe" or "Unsubscribe" and so you will inherit whatever is selected at the level above.

You could use the notification feature in several ways:

1. you could subscribe at the base article level and unsubscribe to discussions that have diverged into areas you are not interested in, or

2.you could stay unsubscribed at the base article level and only subscribe to discussions that are of interest - you'll have to find out about them first, of course.

You are automatically subscribed to a response you wrote, figuring that you are probably interested in finding out about any responses to it.