As regular visitors to The Back Room will know, there are likely to be some changes to the way the forum operates in the fairly near future.
One of them will be to do with registration. Almost certainly the new software will mean we will introduce some form of pre-registration. The effect of this will be that, although -- just as at present -- anyone can browse through all of the threads in the forum, for those who want either to answer an existing message or to begin a new thread it will be necessary to be a registered contributor. The one-time process of registration merely establishes that people who contribute to The Back Room are who they say they are, and it will mean that they will need to have a valid and current email address to which we can send log-in details. (This *doesn't* mean that contributions will be required to include the sender's email address, nor does it mean that senders cannot use nicknames. Contributors will be able to remain as private or as public as they like, just as now. The registration process will be completely opaque as far as the forum is concerned -- and, too, the Data Protection Act prohibits me from revealing registration data to third parties even if I wanted to -- which of course I wouldn't.)
The reason I'm posting this now, well before the date of the proposed change, is that I know some of the people who regularly contribute don't have their own email address. They post their contributions from their office email, or use their school's or their grandma's. So for these people the most convenient solution is to use some form of web-based personal email address, the most popular of which is Hotmail. The advantage of this is that they only need to have access to the Internet -- through any computer -- to send and receive email messages. For those who don't know how to set up such an account, here's a short tutorial (based upon Hotmail).
Go to www.hotmail.com and click on the "Sign up" link near the top of the page. Fill in the details (you'll need to have decided upon the name you want to use -- and be prepared to change it to a variation, because no doubt your first choice will already belong to someone else -- and a password) and hey presto! you have a Hotmail account. Most of the usual email facilities are there, but instead of being tied to a specific computer, or to your (or your boss's) service provider, everything is stored online and is completely personal to the user.
That's really all there is to it, and hopefully there'll be enough time for Back Room visitors to set this up if they need to.
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yahoo e-mail is a good alternative too. It allows you to automaically forward e-mails to your "pop3" account, as well as download from other "pop3" accounts.
Note: "pop3" accounts are those you normally have with service providres such as BT and Freeserve.
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Martyn
A few internet forums refuse to accept members using free email accounts and only allow those with a traceable ISP (ie dial up internet account). This cuts out many of the chancers. Are you sure any of our contributors don't have their own email?
Colin
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Colin M wrote:
> Are you sure any of our contributors don't have
> their own email?
No, I'm not sure. In fact I imagine most of them do. But a heck of a lot of them post from work, and that's what I'd like to cater for.
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Thank you Martyn, I log on from home, work and occasionally from the car or hotel room via mobile. Long live Hotmail!
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On the net4nowt site those using Hotmail accounts found scans by trojans often occured repeatably esp. Sub Seven. Of course no problem if your computer unaffected by viruses.
I do hope you offer an automatic logon for those who use their own computer. This does save time.
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Andrew,
I bet Windows form auto-complete and the cookies will see to that (easy log-on).
David
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Andrew Hamilton wrote:
>
> On the net4nowt site those using Hotmail accounts found scans
> by trojans often occured repeatably esp. Sub Seven. Of course
> no problem if your computer unaffected by viruses.
We have lots of people connect to The Back Room via Hotmail (you might not see it, but our traffic stats tell us this is so), and we've never experienced any problems of this nature.
We don't (and won't) allow the posting of downloadable files to the forum, and since this is really the only vehicle a virus (or worm, or Trojan Horse) can use to get onto an individual's computer, there really is no need to worry about viruses in this context. We *do* send cookies, as you know and some of you have remarked upon , but a cookie is not an 'executable file', and thus carries no risk of virus contamination.
> I do hope you offer an automatic logon for those who use
> their own computer. This does save time.
As far as I can tell in advance, the logon procedure will be handled by cookies after the first time. But even if you have cookies turned off, it only takes a second to type in an email address and password. Hardly time-consuming, surely? You're not confusing logging on with the intial registration process, are you?
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Could Andrew Hamilton please re-explain that in moron monosylables. What's a trojan? What's Sub Seven? Most of us don't know what this means but do want to know.
HJ
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i dont know what a sub-seven is, but a trojan is a kind of virus, its named after the trojan horse (and we all know that story)
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