I posted these suggestions in reply to notification of the pending (now a fact) closure of Revelation Softwares CompuServe Forum. The first time I posted it, it didn't 'take' and I didn't notice that fact until several weeks later. When I finally reposted it, no one appeared to be reading the thread.

Anyway, instead of using this somewhat inadequate discussion board, why doesn't Revelation setup a private news server as many other vendors have been doing? That way there can be groups and subgroups. With a fully featured news reader you can have much of the message threading and management features that were found in TapCIS (along with the various add-ons).

Libraries could be maintained on a FTP server.

Warren,

A newsgroup has already been set up for some time now:

comp.databases.revelation

AFAIK there is no FTP site, although that would be nice.

[email protected]

SRP Computer Solutions

I'm fully aware of the existing UseNet group. I'm talking about a private news server such as Microsoft and others run as well as the public news groups.

A private news server offers greater control, such as user authentification and the ability add and delete groups and subgroups more or less at will. Microsoft maintains a private news server for some of there developer groups and beta programs.

Personally, I really don't see what creating another area for discussion will really do for any of us, except create more work and more duplication of questions and effort. It was bad enough back in the heyday of CompuServe when you'd find the same question in 3 or 4 different sections. We kept revamping sections to try and eliminate, but it never really worked well. I don't know how many of you have ever tried to revamp a CompuServe forum, but trust me when I say that by the time you handled the messages and the libraries and the all the associated descriptions, it was the better part of a full day.

Without trying to 'force' Revelation into things they don't want to do, they have a very flexible and capable system with the Domino stuff without needing to work with new software. Various views of the associated NSF files could be created to handle your grouping and subgroups. I've found the changes in the colors of viewed hyperlinks works wonders in seeing the messages I've read, at least when I read them off the base. Viewed links don't seem to show up until the next loggon session. When I log on, I just click Next Next Next until I get a page full of red links.

Also, as published pages based off a known starting point (http://www.revelation.com/WEBSITE/DISCUSS.NSF/f12696d31000b22a8525652b00831bb2?OpenView) which always loads the first page of the main flat-by-date view, any of those web-page off-line download programs can easily scan 3 or 4 pages deep to pull down all the messages for simple off-line reading and scanning.

Another thing to consider is that the forum died for a reason. It wasn't that Revelation didn't care or respond to it. The only ones that ever came up there from RTI were myself (until I left RTI end of 96) and Cameron. There hadn't been a real RTI support presense, meaning the support department, since sometime in 93 or 94. Even then, it was mostly a peer group discussion, which some major help from AH and SLG and RTM. Question is, why did people leave?

Plenty of answers, some based on the proprietary nature of the forum, the added costs for a CIS membership, general frustration with and abandonment of CIS in general. However, if I were to make an educated guess on the nature of on-line discussion board dealings, I would say that people really want one place, and one place only to have a discussion.

People don't want to carry on multiple conversions. The web forum has been up since April 9, 1996 at 02:35 PM, Eastern Time. CompuServe died over 2 and a half years later. That's a long time. In that time, comp.databases.revelation was formed, with mixed results. So the big question is why did Don Bakke and Jim Vaughn and DSig and Victor Engel and Curt Putnam and all the other long time, heavy posting, regular, reliable and knowledgeable stop posting up there? Why are they all here, continually posting, continually helping, doing everything they did on CompuServe, but here. Why did they abandon?

Some might argue that Revelation abandoned CompuServe and put all their resources up here, but that's not true. Revelation's presence really didn't change on CompuServe. With the exception of the OI evals, no RTI uploads weren't placed on CompuServe.

With this board, there's a single point of entry, a single base to search, a single place to post and query and share all sorts of information.

The lack of enthusiams of comp.databases.revelation shows that people don't really want a newsgroup style.

We can go through this at length if you wish, but I fell this medium and this format will always be the main focal point of all technical discussions about Revelation's products.

[email protected]

Sprezzatura, Inc.

I agree with most of what you said. I will add my two cents' worth.

]Personally, I really don't see what creating another area for discussion will really do for any of us, except create more work and more duplication of questions and effort.

Agreed.

]Viewed links don't seem to show up until the next loggon session. When I log on, I just click Next Next Next until I get a page full of red links.

Yep, that's what I do, too. However, if you navigate in to the discussion through a different view, the URLs change, and hence the messages appear unvisited. This is a bit irritating, and because of it, I don't use other views unless I don't care whether I've visited the messages or not.

]any of those web-page off-line download programs can easily scan 3 or 4 pages deep to pull down all the messages for simple off-line reading and scanning.

Have you tried this? I have found that many of the offline viewers or pre-caching programs stop parsing at a question mark or similar punctuation. This means the links are not followed. I assume this is because the software assumes the URLs are not explicit hard links but rather calls to a program with a passed parameter. This has been a problem for me on other boards as well. If anyone knows of a good solution, I'd be interested to know about it.

]People don't want to carry on multiple conversions. The web forum has been up since April 9, 1996 at 02:35 PM, Eastern Time. CompuServe died over 2 and a half years later. That's a long time. In that time, comp.databases.revelation was formed, with mixed results.

IMO, the main reason for the mixed results of comp.databases.revelation was the surprising rebound of this forum. Remember that one of the reasons for creating the newsgroup in the first place was the unreliability of this forum. Coincidentally, this forum improved greatly about the same time the newsgroup was created, thus preventing an exodus to it.

]So the big question is why did Don Bakke and Jim Vaughn and DSig and Victor Engel and Curt Putnam and all the other long time, heavy posting, regular, reliable and knowledgeable stop posting up there?

My own reasons probably intersect with others:

1) No CIS account at work

2) Emergence of everything I need on the web

3) Extra cost of CIS

4) AOL takeover of CIS (I will not support AOL)

5) Lack of time

]The lack of enthusiams of comp.databases.revelation shows that people don't really want a newsgroup style.

For a while I was prevented from accessing all newsgroups by our proxy server. That may be true for others as well. Then, I had read access but not posting access.

Well said Aaron. For my part, I left CompuServe when I realized that I could go for days, if not weeks, at a time with only a handful of new posts on the forum. There was a period of time when a few hours would generate an enormous load of new questions and responses.

Subconciously I stopped logging into CompuServe and finally it dawned on me that perhaps I didn't need my account anymore. I never used it for Internet access or as my primary e-mail account and the only other reason I used CompuServe was to get to other technical forums. Now that the Web has easily replaced CompuServe in this respect and, as mentioned, this website is a reasonably acceptable replacement there was just no need anymore to keep the other account.

Aaron, you are right on about not wanting to have to visit multiple locations for discussion purposes. This is a large reason why I don't appear much, if at all, in the public news group. The other reason is that I still don't find it to be all that I hoped it would be. Either the feeds to my ISP are choppy or I have to use DejaNews to get to it.

FWIW,

[email protected]

SRP Computer Solutions

If my reply seems scattered or fragmented its because that's the normal state of my mind coupled with the fact that I don't have a copy of the messages before me (too lazy to print them out, spawn another copy of the browser (and waste a socket) or cut and paste into notepad). I'll also try to address some of the points Don and Victor brought up. I'll also post messages reviewing the newsreader that I use (Forte Agent) and another alternative that (perhaps) could have kept the Revelation CIS forum alive (although I mentioned it before), not that it matters at this point.

You suggest using a offline web browser:

1) use of these are banned by many ISPs and blocked by many websites - they soak up an enormous amount of bandwidth and server resources. So before you spend $10 to $60, average of $35-50 on one of these, check with your ISP.

2) with the slow spotty response of this server (if it doesn't time out first it sometimes takes 2 or so minutes to load a page - even on a T1 connection) it would probably take hours (at best) to download at full expansion.

3) This seems not just a step backwards but three steps backwards - back to the time of the old Cosmos BBS (single non-800 number 1200 baud modem line) in the early 80's (before CompuServe) - in order to beat LD charges most people would call in at night or on the weekends and capture and read offline. Then call back in and post your replies. You often had to wait a long time until the line wasn't busy.

The 'success' or 'failure' of the various online support channels are due to a variety of factors, some of which you, Don and Victor have considered and probably some that you haven't (at least not in your messages). Among these are the tools used to access these services. Consider the online services that Cosmos/Revelation Technologies, Inc./Revelation Software has provided:

The Cosmos BBS - back in the early/mid 80's this was about the only means of online support for any vendor. Was it a success? Judging from the busy signals I'd get on evenings and weekends and the amount of message traffic I'd download, I'd say it was. It seems to me it generated a lot more message traffic than the online discussion here. It was organized into topic categories and the interface was simple, character based 1 or 2 letter commands. The message features were similar but not as sophisticated as CompuServe. But then this was the only game in town and if you wanted to be a player you had to play here, even certain people from overseas would call in. Sometimes if you'd call in during business hours you might wind up in chat mode with whoever just may have been sitting near the PC running the BBS: on time I was typing in a question and chat came on and I was told "Wait a second, I'll get so-and-so, he can answer that". The tools back then were simple character based communications programs such as And

rew Flugelman's PC-Talk. These had limited macro capabilities (usually limited to programmable text string on the function keys for taglines or signatures). More sophisticated programs evolved with complex scripting and macro languages (QModem, ProComm etc).

Revelation Forum on CompuServe (mid/late 80's thru 1998) - in the mid 80's sales of Revelation products and the developer community was booming - RevG was an outstanding success, Advanced Revelation in many ways was a quantum leap from there - Cosmos/RTI made one of the best decisions it ever did - they started a vendor forum on CompuServe. It had many advantages over the old BBS: while it could be quite expensive, it could often be a lot cheaper than the LD charges, less busy signals, and with more people online more often you'd get more and better responses much more rapidly, and besides, CompuServe offered much more than just the Revelation Forum. The BBS soon fell to the wayside. Smart move on RTI's part on handing out the trial access kits. Access tools? Well, you could still use those primitive comm programs (I started accessing CompuServe well before the Revelation forum existed using a version of PC-Talk specially modified for CIS). Accessing CompuServe manually through the character based interface i

s downright nasty. The more sophisticated comm programs made life easier because you could record specific input and output sequences and replay them as macros. You could also modify these macros and add scripting to them. Finally somebody did it all for you with TapCIS. Not only did it automate 98.9% of the most common tasks (and 98% of some of the uncommon ones) but it allowed you beat the connect charges and read offline. There was also a high representation of key RTI people: you'd often see messages from Ron Phillips, Mike Pope, Hal Wyman, Alan Humphrey, Pat McNerthy, Dave Cerley, Kurt Baker to name a few that I can recall.

www.revelation.com - 96(?) I don't recall when it was launched, up time in the beginning was so sporadic it's hard for me to say when. Simple interface, wide accessablity (you got Internet access and a browser you can use it) and like the Cosmos BBS and the CompuServe Forum it has an official, 'gen-u-wine' Revelation label. While it is rare that you'll find posting here from Revelation personnel it does happen. I at least find some measure of comfort in the fact that my gripes, suggestions and (all to rare) kudos might be seen by someone at Revelation that might make a difference.

comp.databases.revelation - Aug 97 - Accessibility: if you know about UseNet/Newsgroups and know of the existance of this group and know how to setup a newsreader you can use. You'd be surprised at the number of people who have been using browsers on the Internet for years that will give you a blank stare when you mention UseNet/Newsgroups. I wasn't aware of the revelation newsgroup until the second quarter of this year (I rarely read this website) and I've been using the Usenet heavily since 1994. Interface? As with CompuServe it all depends on the tools you use: you can access a news server with a purely characterbased interface such as Telnet (as long as you have a version that allows you to specify the port - 119 in this case). The next tier are some of the freebie newsreaders such as WinVN, slightly more sophisticated are the freebies that come in the browsers or bundled with Win95/98 (Collabra, Outlook Express, the newsreader in Opera), the next level of sophistication would be free/shareware readers li

ke Free Agent, and finally at the top readers such as Agent and Gravity. To put these tools in perspective it would be like accessing CompuServe via PC-Talk, WinCIM, TapCIS, and finally TapCIS with add-ons (TapIT, TapMark) or OzCIS/OzWin. You'll note that in my messages I advocate the use of Agent or Gravity. IMHO if it were not for tools such as TapCIS/OzCIS you probably wouldn't have had a lot of the heavy posters on CompuServe such as Tom Weissbarth, Curt Putnum, or Andrew McAuley.

To sum it up:

I think the lack of enthusiasm towards comp.databases.revelation is due (in part) to: a general unfamiliarity of the UseNet, lack of familiarity or usage with the sophisticated newsreaders that are available, and the lack of sense of 'official-ness' of the newsgroup: there's no mention of it on the home page (News & Info yes, but how often do *you* read this section opposed to the home) of this website (why not a splash-line "Visit us on the UseNet on comp.databases.revelation!" after all RTI used to hand out those 'Join us on CompuServe' pamphlets like crazy), a search on DejaNews tells me they have about 1700 messages in their archives (this count excludes any message with the 'x-no-archive' tag in the header). Only one message was written by someone '@revelation.com'. While it is rare to see postings from Microsoft on any of the dozens of microsoft.public newsgroups they certainly post much more frequently than one out of seventeen thousand messages!

Don't discount the value of tools: Do you think Revelation and Advanced Revelation would be as popular and successful as they are (or have been) without tools such as RDesign, Paint and Windows?

]]Without trying to 'force' Revelation into things they don't want to do, they have a very flexible and capable system with the Domino stuff

without needing to work with new software. Various views of the associated NSF files could be created to handle your grouping and

subgroups. I've found the changes in the colors of viewed hyperlinks works wonders in seeing the messages I've read, at least when I

read them off the base. Viewed links don't seem to show up until the next loggon session. When I log on, I just click Next Next Next until

I get a page full of red links.«

This is a function of your browser. If you're using Netscape 4.0x, go into Edit - Preferences - Navigator - and press the 'clear history' button and see what happens to your red links or wait more than the number of days that the preference has set to expire your history. And I bet that at least once while clicking 'next' you'll get a 'server not responding message'.

Like TapCIS, a newsreader like Agent maintains its own database and index of messages. As with TapCIS I can mark threads to be watched, add filters to download or ignore messages by author or with subject containing certain keywords. I can print individual messages and threads - without any pesky banners or actionbars.

While this is off topic I feel that my advocacy for the tools in question are of enough importance that I'll take up the time and space here and perhaps risk alienation with the Revelation community. There have been requests for an "Outland" type anything goes discussion section as used to exist on the CompuServe forum but that request has not been taken up, which is to some extent understandable due to the much more wide open nature of this discussion board as compared to a membership only service such as CompuServe.

It was Bryan deSilva's advocacy of TapCIS to the Revelation community which I believe was in part responsible to the success and popularity of the Revelation Forum in the late 80's. Speaking for myself, I certainly would not have used CompuServe as heavily as I did if I had to access it using a tool like Procomm. Even CISNav was not a pleasure to use.

I use the UseNet heavily, monitoring perhaps as much as 30 different groups across as many as five different news servers. I certainly would not be as heavy a user if it were not for some of the sophisticated newsreaders that are avaiable.

What are these features? Let's go through an example that happened just this week:

I have a client that is considering migrating their ARev 1.16 application for Novell Netware 3.12 to Windows NT. The main reason is because they no longer have any one in-house that can support Netware. The just recently they realized they also have an application under Netware written in Business Basic. While I was contracted to support this app as well as ARev, subsequent contracts did not cover this. I assumed that it went away (I know nothing of Business Basic and just sub-contracted that part of it). Now there used to be a forum CIS for the vendor of BB but a search on CIS turned up nothing. I couldn't remember the company name so I looked at the EXE file from an archival copy I had of the application (thank goodness for writable CD-ROMs). Copyright 1989, Basis Incorporated. I go to my browser and try www.basis.com. Bingo! It's them okay…BBXx is the DOS product, and they have a Windows version and a NT version - great news. But what's this on the action bar? "Moving From CompuServe". I click on that an

d what do I see? "As part of our migration from CompuServe to our web site, BASIS has set up a number of new Internet-based services that replace our old CIS offerings." What are those? "Newsgroups","FTP File Libraries", and "Coming Soon - In the near future we hope to offer a complete Internet archive of the BASIS CompuServe Forum". Hmmm, fools think alike as the saying goes.

So they have a private news server, let's see how I set that up in Forte Agent:

To support multiple servers, Agent requires a separate data directory for each server and you need to create a separate shortcut that uses that directory as the working directory and then edit the preferences which are stored in an INI file in that directory. Kludge, but it works. Other newsreaders handle this much easier (Collabra, Outlook Express, Gravity). Cloning the data dir, changing the settings and clearing out any old data takes maybe two minutes. I connect to the news server (news.basis.com) and get a listing of all the groups on the server. This takes all of 10 seconds to connect to the server and download the 13 group names. Mind you that I'm doing this over a 28.8 modem connection to my ISP (already connected). Okay, I subscribe to all this groups and hit the "Get New Headers in Subscribed Groups". Two and half minutes later its done, total count 3154 messages.

The main window of Agent has three panes or sub-windows; one showing the groups, another the message headers, and finally one that shows the text (if downloaded) of the active message. Let's look at these panes:

Various views of the panes can be changed by clicking on the caption bar of the pane, each pane can be zoomed to full screen.

Groups - views - subcribed, all, folders (I can create folders that messages can be moved or copied to)

Message - no view changes from the caption bar but I can show the complete message header if I wish (like showing or suppressing the headers in e-mail).

Headers - subcaptions - sorts message headers by

- Thread/Size

- Subject - (also has view filters - all messages, unread, unread with bodies, messages with bodies - you can define your own too - I've added 'no bodies'.

- Author

- Date

So how do you use this monster?

Select the group you're interested in from Group pane. In the Headers pane you can mark the messages you want to download, you can also mark specific threads to watch or ignore (messages in watched threads are downloaded immediately whenever you connect and scan the groups for new messages). You can also add filters that will watch or ignore any messages by subject or author - filters can be complex with and/or logic as well as wildcards - if you set an ignore filter you can skip the message or delete it totally from the database - great for blocking out spam and twits in general. So right here you have all the functions of OzCIS/Win or TapCIS with TapIt and TapMark. And as with TapCIS you can set it to download messages immediately rather than just the headers.

Other functions include the ability to join multipart messages and download and decode uue and mime encode binaries (Agent can automatically join multipart messages, Free Agent does not). You can customize many of the parameters at the group level (signature, download directory, reply-to etc.).

RE: Access through proxy server

All you need to do is request a port from the powers that be, explaining exactly what you need and more importantly why you need it. If you had read-only access than something wasn't setup properly. For details on how to setup a newsreader (in this case Forte Agent, but applicable to most newsreaders) see http://www.hillm.demon.co.uk/agent/firewall.html. I've never had a problem getting a news server proxy port opened for me, and I'm not the most diplomatic person in the world.

Besides you can always map it through the http proxy, or use DejaNews or SuperNews on the web. Or you can always post on the UseNet via smtp and many of the mail-to-news relay services.

As for not having a CIS account at work, the ability to connect to CompServe via TCP/IP has existed for a number of years (at least since whenever they released WinCIM v2.0). As has OzWin. I'd always take a copy of WinCIM to me to a client. Using WinCIM via a T1 connection is almost a pleasure.

Besides all of the above, RTI could have put the Compuserve Forum on the web years ago. Take a look at http://www.compuserve.com/forum_center/

Posting can be restricted to CIS members only (plug-in required) but some groups can be set as open to anybody on the Internet (see the MS-DOS forum for example).

I suggested Revelation go this route not soon after the notice was posted here of the possible and pending demise of the CIS forum, but this not so reliable dissussion board didn't take my message a fact of which I didn't notice until it was too late (not that it would have mattered anyway).

Not to worry, many of my 2 page postings are just a serious of various brain spews which hit the keyboard as fast as I think them with no serious editting or true believe in the concept of paragraphs, or with the sometimes animalistic names showing up here, paragiraffes.

To continue to beat the dead horse some…

I'm using Opera right now, so I have this window and your post in seperate MDI windows. Try it, you might like it.

I don't know of any sites that would bar off-line browsers, since I can't really see how they'd know it was them. It's just as if you went click,click,click really fast. A good one would only run one socket into the page, parsing the page and pulling all the links, then download them one at a time. A better one would let you go through x levels of links, so you'd always get the last 3 full pages of questions (about 90) in ago.

Let's eliminate the spotiness of the server for the purposes of this discussion. While I know it's an issue, I have it on good authority that Revelation is working on this. It's almost like saying don't use CompuServe since you can't connect to that either. My Philly node is almost always down, so it seems. Luckilly, from my SysOp connections, I know a back-door testing number which I can use or I can borrow a friend's ISP line.

I don't see how doing off-line is a step backwards. The newsgroups are off-line, as is CIS (at least the way you and I use them). Off-line is off-line and I don't see how using this dicussion board in that way is a step backwards.

You're absolutly correct in that tools are everything. You're end point, Do you think Revelation and Advanced Revelation would be as popular and successful as they are (or have been) without tools such as RDesign, Paint and Windows? is spot on. Cam and I used to have long walks around Cambridge talking for hours on just this topic.

Be that as it may, I was about to go on to a different topic, but I just got a flash of an idea. I think it's not as much a problem with tools, but a dislike of the format. I could be completely wrong here, but I'm starting to think that it's not that you dislike having the discussion here on the web site, but you dislike the format of the discussion. I'd bet if the format was modified into a frame type based, which expandable topics and sub-topics in one frame and the message in another, you might find it more to your liking (speed not withstanding).

If this is a correct guess, we could be at a standstill. Don't know.

Revelation put their eggs into the Domino basket and, personally, I think it's a fine idea. Don't know if you've ever used Notes or not, but if notes was designed for anything, it was designed to do discussions databases like this one. Citrix also uses Domino for their site and it's set up slighty different, at least on the KB and other non-interactive side, and they use Delphi or something else for other discussions instead of the native Domino. Point is, that about a year ago, they also had direct access into a Citrix box so that you could use the discussion right through the NSF files direct into Notes. I found that much superior, since I always used Notes when I was at Revelation to handle the database. I only used a browser when I was at home.

As for CSI, personally, I like OzCIS and thought TAP was kludgy and put together with strings and mirrors, but that's a personal opinion. TAP's really popular and y'all must have seen something in there I did not or could not.

My big problem with the newsgroup is my provider is still CompuServe, and probably will be after my ID is pulled and CompuServe does not have a feed for comp.databases.revelation so I'm forced to use deja news. On the grand scheme of things, I'd much rather use this forum as it is than that, even with the sporadic unable to connects. I've found that about 98% of the time I can't connect, if I just wait until I get the unable to connect message, instead of continually trying, the second time it always works. Personally, I think the errors are coming from the autoload into the list instead of the periodic refresh there used to be, but I have no technical proof of this, just a hunch from years of support work.

As for the join CompuServe, let's not forget that unlike this forum or the newsgroups, or any of the other forums we've all talked about, CompuServe is a commercial service. Revelation paid and was paid to have a forum. As such, it was in their financial interests to promote the forum since this means they got a bigger check.

The reason the forum was killed had nothing to do with lack of desire, but CompuServe was not making any money off the forum, so therefore killed it. CompuServe is killing forums like crazy these days. Part of the reason is the move to alternative sources. Part of the reason is their conversion to fixed based pricing. When you paid by the minute, the longer you were on, the more you paid. I remember Mark Martin once ran up a monthly bill of over $1,000. Now, that monthly bill would have been $19.95. That's a lot of money for CompuServe to lose. Multiply Mark by hundreds of thousands of addresses and you'll see were talking serious money here. Forums that aren't generating serious trafic are wasting resources and AOL has made a decision to scrap everything but the biggest and best of the bunch. I don't understand it, really, but that's what was decided. I don't know much, since even as the SysOP, CompuServe did not have the courtesy of even telling me anything. I just know what I know from other fo

rums and other SysOPs and what happened to them.

[email protected]

Sprezzatura, Inc.

The main reason the forum was never moved to the web is that it's not just a "oh, let's move the forum to the web". The first step in doing this was converting to HMI, which, ironicly enough, you were the only one opposed to this. The second is actually designing the page. Each forum must design their own page and maintain it, making the required changes as CompuServe changes the forum software. I decided I didn't want to go through the hassle. I'll admit I never stopped to discuss this with Revelation (Cameron would have been the main contact) and didn't really offer it in the SysOP section of the forum. However, the volunteer sysops, had they been sufficently motivated, would have asked about it. No one ever made mention of it.

[email protected]

Sprezzatura, Inc.

]All you need to do is request a port from the powers that be, explaining exactly what you need and more importantly why you need it. If you had read-only access than something wasn't setup properly.

Boy you make it sound so simple. This assumes several things: 1) the powers that be are readily identifiable, 2) the environment is relatively static, 3) I have the time to do all this.

]Besides you can always map it through the http proxy,

Not sure what you mean here.

]or use DejaNews or SuperNews on the web.

I've never used Supernews, but I have used Dejanews. What advantage does it have over this forum?

]Or you can always post on the UseNet via smtp

Assuming you are allowed to post via smtp.

]and many of the mail-to-news relay services.

I'm not familiar with these.

]As for not having a CIS account at work, the ability to connect to CompServe via TCP/IP has existed for a number of years (at least since whenever they released WinCIM v2.0). As has OzWin. I'd always take a copy of WinCIM to me to a client. Using WinCIM via a T1 connection is almost a pleasure.

I hate the WinCIM interface. I find it to be terribly inefficient.

]Posting can be restricted to CIS members only (plug-in required)

That's another thing that irks me – having to download plugins all the time.

]I suggested Revelation go this route not soon after the notice was posted here of the possible and pending demise of the CIS forum, but this not so reliable dissussion board didn't take my message a fact of which I didn't notice until it was too late (not that it would have mattered anyway).

Well, it's reliable enough that if you go back to check if your message posted, it really did post. Actually, for me it boils down to time. My time was being used up with email (I use Forte's Agent) and web stuff. After a couple months elapsed without my accessing Compuserve (and I was a SYSOP at the time to boot), I realized I was wasting my money maintaining my account. The final straw was when AOL took over.

Victor

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