The Forum News Gateway

Beta version 0.4 of the gateway was released on 26 January 1995. There are many new features and bugfixes--see the CHANGES file.

The Forum News Gateway puts netnews on the World Wide Web. It's a server that talks to one or more news servers and sends back news articles as HTML pages to connecting web clients. Like a traditional newsreader, it lets users subscribe to groups and keeps track of what's been read. Unlike a traditional newsreader, it lets you post and view html. Using the Forum News Gateway, you can exchange public messages with graphics, mathematical writing, and links to other documents and Internet sources.

The Forum News Gateway was developed by The Geometry Forum, a project for mathematics on the Internet funded by the National Science Foundation. The software is copyrighted by Swarthmore College, "all rights reserved." Free use is permitted, with no restrictions.

The gateway is written in perl. It runs on unix machines.

By accessing http://forum.swarthmore.edu:2000 you can try out reading news from the Forum News Gateway server running on our Forum computer. Since we don't have the computer power to support your full newsreading activity, we have limited this copy of the server to allow access to only a few newsgroups. With a forms- and authentication-capable Web browser you may use this link to access our geometry newsgroups, plus our local testing newsgroup where we have posted some articles in HTML. See what it's like to read news on the Web. When you set up your own copy, you'll have full access to all the newsgroups available on your local news server(s).

The README file explains how to set up and run the gateway. The CHANGES file lists the changes since the last version.

To join our mailing list, send e-mail to forumnews-request@forum.swarthmore.edu. For the time being, requests to join are being handled by a human, so it may take a day or two. Once you have joined the list, you can send to it at forumnews@forum.swarthmore.edu.

You can download the current version (0.4 beta) installation package. We have been having intermittent trouble with our anonymous ftp. If you get repeated messages that there are too many anonymous ftp users, please send e-mail and we'll fix it.

Please send comments and suggestions to Jay Scott, jay@forum.swarthmore.edu.

Here are some comments comparing the Forum News Gateway to other Web newsreading options.