would someone explain how i use the usenet from here!! i need help!!

63 responses total.

Matt, I put this in the other item.  Honestly.

OK, to make it as point-blank stupidly easy as I can.

Type !trn at the Ok: prompt.

I couldn't have said it better, or worse, myself.

This response has been erased.

But (and I said this in the other item too), if you are going to try to
read news here, prepare for a *long* wait.  We don't have an onsight news
disk, and if you've ever used our Internet connection, you will have
noticed how slow it is.

To add to #3: the command        find "keyword"       will bring
up all the responses in all Items in which "keyword" appears. Or
is that the same as     browse "topicname"    ?

In fact, presumably because news is ****SO SLOW****, it sometimes just
crashes on you.  (And I've been giving up on news lately, when it's still
sitting there after 15 minutes or half an hour without giving me *anything*.
No idea how much longer it would be.)

Re #3:  I'll second Valerie's recommendation of the "info" conference
for answers to "how to" questions on system utilities and applications.
There's a lot of information currently there, and if you don't find
what you're looking for, you can always enter a new item to ask your
question.  Several system-knowledgable people hang out in "info", 
so you're likely to get answers in more depth than when you ask
in agora.

ello

Should this be linked to info?

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does this mean that we are going to make a habit of linking every item
that's entered by a newuser in the wrong conference, even though the
answer to their question is IN the appropriate conference already, several
times in fact? No wonder those conferences get so big... why bother
reading anything but Agora? We can just enter every item here and if we
want to specialize in something, we can join the conference for it. I'll
never enter an item anywhere but Agora again...

Too much of that and nobody will want to read agora.  Best strategy
is to learn what conferences are here, join the ones that best 
match your interests, and enter material appropriate to those
conferences directly in those conferences.

Why not stop "dumping" people into Agora?  Put New Users into the "New Users"
conference, where they learn how to access the others?..Don't link...teach
them to go to the appropriate conference.  Just a suggestion.

One danger of that is that oldusers might not put newusers in their
.cflist. Agora is the community marketplace, and newcomers can join
in with what is going on. What would happen if all the newusers
were isolated in their own playground? I don't think it would help.
One thing I hope you have noticed is that oldusers use agora, and
are *not* annoyed by newuser problems.

Not too much anyway. Massive repitition makes for lots of "forgets," though.

Those "forgets" don't usually get applied to newuser problems but to
subsequent inane babble.

   That is an interesting idea Peg, and it's been discussed
before.  Perhaps I'm getting old, but I can't remember why we
decided not to do that.  Well, probably one good reason is
that most people read a lot before responding to anything;
typically 90% of a conference population is read-only.  So
a test conference would stiffle a lot of those people,
'cause believe it or not most people still don't know about
the other conferences or how to get into them.
   So now that I've thought about it a little, I think
I remember feeling that its was probably a little better
to keep newbies in the agora conference, from that last
debate over the issue.  But you're welcome to start it
up again--certainly we're getting a very different set of people
on Grex these days; gone forever are the times of techie
folk dominating this (or any other) system.

I think a better solution is to have some **good**, **easy-to-find**
introductory stuff readily available in Agora.  And maybe as an (optional)
endpoint for newuser, too.

Re #17, next-to-last line:  s/techie/mature/

ROTFL!

Re: 18, the Info conference contains a lot of that.  Maybe link two
or three standard items from Info to Agora?  Or would a standard,
frozen, tutorial item in Agora be better?

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I would hope that new users would find the hypertext browser, lynx,
a helpful way to get introductory material. All they have to do is type
!lynx at the Ok: prompt and navigate with their arrow keys.
(Don't try this on a dumb terminal, kids, you need ansi, vt-100 or better).

Which may mean that we need to put a wrapper around it to check term setting.
(Or does it refuse to run, with some coherent error message, in the presence
of TERM=dumb?)

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Try 'ansi-newer'.

Thanks. John. Lynx *should* work with ansi.

If you have a dumb term, you get this:


>
>  Your Terminal type is unknown!
>
>  Enter a terminal type: [vt100] 

I can't see how lynx would be very confusing. It has the navigation 
instructions at the bottom, along with how to get help (which is extensive).

You haven't dealt with some of the users I have.  (Recent example: one
who incorrectly stated that a modem was switched on and that lights were
on on the front of it, among *many* other such things.  Makes phone support
lots of fun.  To the real novice - not used to anything technical at all -
a menu is *very* confusing.

But *there is nothing we can do* about that.  No matter *what* we do, there
will be confused people, and adding more & more verbiage to try to avoid it
buries the relevant info for people who have a clue but still need help.
Lynx is pretty straightforward, & a pretty good choice for the most part,
IMNVHO.  The attention should be on wording for the options, organization
of the material, and so forth.  For example, having been told that one could
easily get to Grex via MSU's gopher, I spent about 1/2 hour trying, with no
success, to find where.  I looked *everywhere*.  Yes, I even tried under
Internet Resources By Type, but I guess I missed trying the Free-Net systems
one there; and other things there all seemed to be descriptive rather than
providing access, leading me to think it was the wrong menu.  I think.
I offer this only to say that it takes a lot of work to make the proper
path through all those menus reasonably obvious to the person who doesn't
already know where to look.

Hi everyone,

So I took a look at lynx, and it looks informative.  The main problem 
that I still see is that the new user must take some kind of action to access
it.  You already made an obvious decision to give every new user an account
without giving them an option to remain a "visitor".  

I figured out pretty fast how to respond in Agora...but I figured out
how to "enter" a new topic before understanding that it might be better
to look for the appropriate conference to"enter" into.  Hey, it might
be as simple as renaming "Agora" to "New User". ...How boring.

As a reluctant Unix user, I found the "!" commands a little intimidating...
they were the last thing I sought to figure out.  Still haven't figured
out how to change the details in my account...unfair, but such a challenge.
I do want to say  (after all the whining) that I've found everyone
to be pretty helpful here.  Thanks for making the newbie welcome.

 What is it that you want to change, Peg? You can change your .plan
and just about anything else about your account.

oh man...do I have to "VI" it?  I decided not to give my address
in the account, even after seeing the "paranoid" command in the 
help file...
but after spending a few days here, I'm feeling a little 
insecure about using my own name, and feel I should make up
something "cutsie".  I'm too old for this shit.

 You can use the command  set name at the next prompt to change
what your name is in a particular conference. I was not born "Unixsaurus"
but I like to use it just the same. 
The command !chfn will change your name in the list, and on your
mail. Mine still is The Winnemucca Kid, even though I no longer use
it in it in agora. 
 so, in conclusion, you would use !chfn whatever name you want   for
a global change, and set name for a change in only the present conference.

Peg, if you want to edit a file and are intimidated by "vi" as are many,
you might try one of the other editors we keep here. You'll find
!pico .plan
Will give you the option to edit your .plan in a friendly way.
pico puts up info on the screen to help you use it - it's friendly.

Its only friendly if you have a smart terminal.

True, but I think most people's setups nowadays can do at least vt100
or ansi terminal type, which is good enough for pico, vi, and the
other full-screen editors.  There are probably exceptions.

I think maybe it's not her .plan she wants to change.  Peg, that's the
info that shows when someone does a finger on you, and you can do pretty
much anything you want to it.  For an editor that doesn't require much
of a learning curve, pico is indeed your best choice.

There's a program, change, to let you change things about how the system
operates for you.  Its options are as follows:
1) Change special keys (erase, etc.)
2) Change your terminal type
3) Change your full name
4) Change your password
5) Change your "pager" for PicoSpan (and Unix, too)
6) Change the program you use to edit text
7) Change the program you use to send and receive mail
8) Change your login shell
The change program is menu-driven.  I haven't used it (I prefer to
play with my .profile myself, and I know how to run passwd myself),
but I'm guessing that these are the kinds of things you were wanting to do.
From a Picospan prompt just type !change - from a Unix shell prompt, just
type change

There are also a lot of other customizations you can do specifically relating
to how Picospan acts.  (Note that some of these interact with things
controlled by the change program, and if you set them for Picospan they'll
override (within Picospan) any system defaults you have set up.  The ones
this applies to are your pager, editor, and mail program settings.)  To set
these up, use Picospan's HELP commands to figure out what you want to do
(or ask specific questions of people).  Test to make sure that you know what
the Picospan commands really do by just issuing them from the Ok: prompt.
Then, when you're sure, edit your .cfonce file and add the commands in
question to it.  This is a file of Picospan commands which is run once
when you bring up Picospan.

Wow!  Thanks for all the help.  I think you all covered most
of what I'd want to do.  I use a Mac with MAC241 emulator 
software, so I should be ok with Picospan, I'll try it.
Actually, I'm not too bad with "VI"...had to start using 
it at work recently.  I just think it's a "crazy little language..
;)"  

Crazy like a fox, though.  You can make it do a lot for you
if you know how to pull its strings.

I'm getting there.  I was really thrilled with myself
Friday because I figured out how to get a whole
column of numbers out of a file using :g/ 30.*/s// ...
And the capability to edit a number of files in succession with
*s, n and . is a plus.  It's just so un-natural...like golf.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss