The other side

I just been on the side, the new groups.
Anything we put up about hammer goes on that site, I went on the Hammer site.
who does that or is it auto?
I can get all the new groups if I want, (Which I don't)
I have been on them before, and I never liked it.




star38

[Juan Aneiros]

Newsgroups are public and not own by anyone as such. They work on news servers which are all connected by the use of a communication protocol called "NNTP". Many ISP have them and can chose which ones to have as well as permissions such as post or read only.

We have installed our own news server. It's expensive but it was done for another site and since we own all our servers, we can do as we please with it. In other words, someone else is paying for it's bandwidth.

When anyone posts on the network to those newsgroups, we receive those posts automatically by a script which grabs the text and formats it automatically to the format this forums use. That is done by using a "crontab"which is basically a script that executes itself on a timer, in our case is 15 minutes but most servers have it on a 2, 6, 24 hour timer depending on how powerful their server is and the bandwidth that they can afford. All our servers are an overkill, so we could even set up one minute crontabs.

When you post here, the script translate in the opposite side, from forum format on to newsgroup.

It's pretty clever and if you must know, we were one of the first to have implemented it. In fact, we have been working on it as part of a development team.

The reason we have done this is to open up to other groups an opinions while not jeopardising Mr Lee's site with unapropiate topics and embarasing posts. We do not monitor what it is said in newsgroups nor we care as they are not owned by us. We cannot be sued and Mr Lee cannot kill me. Want to call him Dracula without getting banned? You can do so safely at the Hammer newsgroup.

We have also worked out a way in which you can post directly from your e-mail to the forums without visiting the site or any newsgroup. It may not seem logical but when I am away, I can check the forums and posts from a WAP device, in other words a mobile phone. I don't need a computer or an internet connection to do it.

Another thing we have been looking into, is co-branding individual forums to several related sites. Namely, the star wars community who have shown interest and many are to small to afford their own server. Hosting a forum is not a hobby as many people think, it gets very expensive not to mention labour intensive. By allowing restricted use and access to other sites to parts of our server, they can have their own branded forums connected to ours and share the workload but at no cost to them. It's their forum located at our server with their own design etc, only we share the members and posts. The same as a newsgroup.

Wow cool

I think you have done a very good job, Admin.

But I still don't like news groups.
Sorry.




star38

[Trevor Ball]

It is brilliant, but I also don't like newsgroups, so I'm unlikely to use them.