France, if you have already read the message, it won't show up in "new" mode. Hit "All" or "This week" and the messages will reappear. Also, when you start a new topic, the first window is just for the topic name and sub heading. The window you see that looks like a message window is for a longer description of the topic. Once the topic is defined you can go to the thread (or topic) and enter a message in it. Amy

Oh dear - I think I just created a couple of very long sub-headings. New board, learning new tricks - what's intuitive to the guy who writes the software is often not so for me! Anna

I did the same thing. The field looks like a place to put a message. It's too long for a sub head.

Amy, it doesn't seem to hurt if you do put your text in as a sub-header - it comes up as message 0, but people joining the topic can still see it, and you have the option of going back to message 0 if you want to reivew the topic. This set-up looks like it would cope with large volumes better than the one you were running, but I really liked the overview one got with your set-up, and the way the threads could split and develop new headers, providing an outline of the development of an idea. I suppose it was supplying all that information that eventually made your P&P2 BB crash, but it *was* a really nice set-up. Anna

Me too, Anna. I like the outline, cascading structure.

This is a different model, it keeps a single thread without branching. I suppose you'll have top open more topics than you had before to preserve different aspects of conversations. This format has worked very well on ECHO, the WELL and Electric Minds, three highly successful online communities.

Yes, BUT it makes it very difficult to indicate what you are responding to without ending up doing a lot of quoting of old material. Also, if there are many new postings, by the time you get to the end, you have forgotten what all of the things that you wanted to say about earlier comments are. It's much more efficient, spontaneous and natural to be able to attach comments directly to the posts that they are referring to!

I know (sigh), it makes it nicer for nonlinear people like you. We just decided to adopt the same model as the WELL and ECHO (etc.) when we built this because we saw how well the users responded to the interface in these other places. Also, this software doesn't offer threaded, branching type conversations.

This looks like an html implementation of Caucus - many of the terms are identical [freeze, forget], though "topic" is used in place of "item". I'd love to see an html implementatin of CoSy (BIX [Byte Informatin eXchange - the online Byte magazine] used to use CoSy if that helps anyone). CoSy is threaded conferencing software. I like it best of the many I've encountered with the exception of Matt's scripts that Amy was using. Now that I think of it, it is very similar to CoSy - and also has some featur s similar to newsreading software such as trn. (Caucus, CoSy, trn are all text based, though there is a version of Caucus called WebCaucus in its beta existance which is html based. I will have to go check out WebCaucus again sometime soon.)

We used caucus for a while. See the archives on the front page of the Spring at http://www.spring.com and then we found yapp, which is much lower cost and is most more robust (in my opinion). ECHO uses Caucus.

Joan Winsor, where is she?