Instructions for using HyperNews 1.9*

This is a customized instructions page for the Geant4 HyperNews site. The home page of HyperNews development, as of Aug. 1997, is at www.HyperNews.org, which lists many other sites.

If you would like to just test some aspect of HyperNews, you are welcome to do that on the test page.

Table of Contents

• Becoming a Member
• Reading Messages
• Adding a Message
• Submitting your Message
• Administration of Messages
• Subscribe, Unsubscribe, and Notification
• Email gateway

Overview

Subscribing is different from joining. Subscribing is what you do to be notified when something is added. Joining gives you membership. Membership is required in order to subscribe to a Geant4 HyperNews forum. It is not required for the public SLAC forum.

Becoming a Member

You may be required to become a member in order to subscribe to HyperNews forums. It also makes posting messages easier as you have to supply less information to identify yourself.

To become a member of HyperNews, click on the Membership link on any page from that site. Fill out the form and submit it.

Your User ID is the identifier that is associated with all the personal information about you. It is also referred to as your nickname. This information includes the following:

• Password (8 character maximum)
• Name (e.g. Joe User)
• Personal URL - your home page.
• Email Address (e.g. name@domain).
• Optional Phone Number and Snail Mail Address.

The Name and Personal URL will be used whenever you add a message and use the same user id. Your name will be a link to your personal URL. Your email address will be a "mailto" URL.

The New Password field may NOT be left empty. There is no way for HyperNews to tell you your password since it is immediately encrypted, so please try to remember it. If you forget your password, you should send email to Owner-HyperNews@slac.stanford.edu to get it reset.

If membership is required for some operation, you will be requested by your browser to authenticate once and then you don't have to keep reentering your User ID and password. Membership applies to all pages on the site.

Reading Messages

Reading is open to the public - that's what people like about the web. Reading can be closed to members only but only for the whole site, in which case you will have to become a member first.

A HyperNews "forum" (or "base article") looks like a normal web page except there may be "messages" appended to the end after a "Messages" header, and there are controls to traverse the messages, add new ones, etc. A message looks like a base article except it also displays some header lines at the top of the page identifying the context and author of the message. A "reply" is another name for a message that has been added in-reply-to another message, or to a base article.

New messages are always after old messages added to the same thing. The newest of the new messages have a icon of some kind to draw your attention.

Outline and Inline

After the body of a message you will see only the replies to that message (and sub-replies etc). You can change how deeply nested the message outline is by selecting one of the numbers after "Outline Depth" on the "Messages" header line. If the replies go deeper than the outline depth (default is 3), you will see a "..." where there would be more.

An abbreviation is used for a chain of a single reply to a single reply, etc. Instead of indenting, subsequent replies are displayed at the same level prefixed by "->".

You can also embed messages inline by selecting one of the numbers after "Inline Depth" (was called "Embed"). The inlined messages will be displayed sequentially in "digest" form. If you select less than inlining "All", there may be non-inlined replies to some of the inlined messages, and these will be displayed after the appropriate message in outline form as usual. The title of each inlined message is a link to a page with just that message on it, so you can reply to it or do other things with it.

Navigation

You can use one of several navigation buttons to simplify reading of neighboring messages.

"Next Message"

Go to the next message that is replying to the same thing, skipping over any replies to this message. If there is no next message, go to the next message one level up.

"Previous Message"

Go to the previous message that is replying to the same thing. If there is no previous message, just go up to the immediate parent.

"Out (or "Next Thread")

Go to the next message one level up, skipping replies and following messages at the same level.

"More (or "Next-in-Thread")

Go to the first reply, if there is one, or the next message at the same level, or some higher level. Use this to read every message.

Frames

If you are using a browser that can display frames (such as Netscape 2.0), you can try using HyperNews with frames by clicking on the "Frames" button on the bottom of the page. If you don't like it, you can turn it off by clicking on "No Frames" . With frames, three frames will be displayed: a "base frame" in the upper left, an "outline frame" in the upper right, and a "message frame" in the bottom half. Clicking on a message in the outline will display it in the message frame. So far, this should be obvious. What is not so obvious is that you can display any message in the base frame by clicking on the "New Frameset" button on the bottom of the message frame. Most other links will display either in the same frame or in a new window - this is partly so that the frame history is not lost with Netscape 2.0.

Adding a Message

You can submit messages that are automatically displayed in the message tree at the end of the current message. First make sure the thing you want to add the message to (i.e. reply to) is the message that is displayed. Then just click on the "Add Message" button at the bottom of the page or the sign near the top of the list of messages.

On the message form, you should provide a title that says something distinctive about what your message is. Any HTML tags in the title will be converted to plain text. If you leave the title empty, the title will be "Untitled".

Your message 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:

• "Smart Text" (or "Paragraph Filled" - old name) means each paragraph, separated from its neighbors by empty lines, will be wrapped and filled. You can insert line breaks at the end of each line or make it all one long line; either way works. Several additional formatting tricks are supported: A paragraph will be left unformatted if any line starts with spaces or tabs. Lines that start with the same prefix or with a <label>: prefix will be left unformatted. Anything that looks like a URL or email address will be made into an anchor. HTML tags are converted into plain text. 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 where appropriate.

• "Raw Text" is like "Plain Text" except it is totally hands off. It will not hyperize in URLs its finds in the message.

• "HTML" means you have the full power of the HyperText Markup Language. This is how you get images embedded in your messages, for example. But you must at least separate paragraphs with <P> or they will look like one big blob. Please try to generate correct HTML since you could otherwise mess up the display of the appended message tree. Don't include the <HEAD> or <BODY> tags, however.

• "URL" means you enter just the URL of a document to use. For example, http://my.site/my-message.html. The URL may be a full http URL including the server name, or an absolute path starting with "/" (for 1.9B4.1). 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. It will NOT be copied to the HyperNews server.

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

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

Fill the appropriate identification information at the bottom depending on whether you are a member or not.

Submitting your Message

When you are done editing your message, push the Preview Message button. The next page will be your message formatted as it will appear to readers (using your browser at least), with a Submit button at the top. If it looks OK, go ahead and Submit it.

If you want to edit your message, use your browser to back up to the previous page with the message form. (If it is empty, maybe try a different browser or check your brower's cache settings. This behavior IS NOT due to HyperNews. Alternatively, copy the text of your message *before* you preview it.) Reloading the form page will clear out all the entries. You can't reload the preview page, and don't submit it twice for the same message (neither will do the right thing).

If you decide to not submit your message, just don't push the Submit button.

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

Administration of Messages

You can reorganize messages that have been posted by using the copy, move, and delete commands. Starting with version HyperNews 1.9B5.6, the copy, move, and delete operations are combined into one interface, and there are two ways to use it. The first way allows you to perform the action on the currently displayed message and all submessages: click on the Copy/Move/Delete link on the bottom of the page (i.e. ). The second way allows you to select several messages at once and perform the same operation on all of them: click on "Admin Mode" on the bottom of the page to redisplay the outline with a check box next to each message title, select the messages you want, and then click on the Copy/Move/Delete button.

Both ways lead to the same form that gives you several options. You can specify a destination if you want to copy or move. The destination is a HyperNews relative path, relative to the directory HyperNews discussions are stored. The destination must be an existing forum or message to which you want the messages added, so you have to know the name of the destination before you can do a copy or move. You also have the option of whether to notify subscribers at the destination.

You can specify whether to delete if you want to move or only delete. If you are not an administrator, you can generally only delete messages you own. If there are any submessages left after the deletion, the body of your message will be deleted, but there will still be a placeholder in the tree of messages; this will be removed once the submessages are deleted. If you also copied, the placeholder will forever forward the reader to the new location.

Subscribe, Unsubscribe, and Notification

You can be notified by email when any new messages are added to an forum or message (or any replies to those messages etc). This section describes how.

If you are the author of an forum or message, and you provided a correct email address, then you are automatically subscribed; you need do nothing. This assumes that you are probably interested in finding out about any replies to your messages. You may explicitly unsubscribe either when you post the message or by using the Notification feature described here.

To subscribe, unsubscribe, or inquire about your subscription status for a particular forum or message, first display that forum or message. Then select the "Subscribe" (or "Notification" for older versions of HyperNews) link at the bottom of the page.

On this Notification form, first enter your userid 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 message you were displaying, or any of its ancestors all the way up to the base article (i.e. forum). The title of each message or forum is displayed in a list, and for each you can select either "Subscribe", "Unsubscribe" or "Not Specified". If you select "Not Specified", that means HyperNews will use whatever you select at the next level up, or "Unsubscribe" if you are already at the top level.

You could use the notification feature in several ways. You could subscribe at the base article (i.e. forum) level and unsubscribe to discussions that have diverged into areas you are not interested in. Or you could stay unsubscribed at the base article level and only subscribe to discussions that you are interested in - you'll have to find out about them first, of course, by browsing through the messages.

To easily handle your forum subscriptions for the whole site, use the Central HyperNews Subscription Page.

Email gateway

This HyperNews site supports an email gateway for posting messages. One can send email to both post new messages on a forum or to reply to previous messages.

If you are subscribed to a forum, simply replying to a message you received from a forum will post a reply to that message on the forum. Make sure to use your Reply All feature on your email client as the From: field will contain the email address of the poster, not the HyperNews forum. Also, most modern email clients will properly handle the Reply-To header which is used by HyperNews to identify the message being replied to. If not, you may need to handle the Reply-To header by hand according to the instructions at the top of the message you are replying to.

To post a new message to forum, you simply send a normal email message to the proper email address for that forum. By convention, this email address is the short name of the forum with a "-g4hn@slac.stanford.edu" appended. For example, if the URL of a forum is http://geant4-hn.slac.stanford.edu:5090/HyperNews/get/JavaUsage.html, then the email address for it is JavaUsage-g4hn@slac.stanford.edu.