Groggs
Martin Hardcastle
before its untimely demise this September. Groggs is still with us,
however, and we've now decided to release it publicly.
Full information on how to access Groggs can be found on the Groggs
web site: <URL: http://www.groggs.group.cam.ac.uk/groggs/">.
For those without Web access, the Groggs home page is reproduced
below.
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GROGGS
General
GROGGS is a distributed discussion board system on the University Data
Network, open to all users. It aims to enable users to discuss a wide
variety of subjects, ranging from computing to serious social and political
issues. Humour, poetry, advertisements and advice are also welcome; in fact
we welcome anything which is likely to be of interest.
GROGGS was a single-system discussion system on the University's mainframe,
Phoenix. Phoenix closed on September 1st 1995, and GROGGS has migrated to
run on a Unix system.
GROGGS is different from Usenet news in a number of ways. Its concept of
items provides much stronger threading than news has. Its centralised nature
means that quoting of text is unnecessary and the format encourages
well-thought-out replies rather than one-liners. Perhaps most importantly,
there are a set of rules and editors to enforce them; this ensures a higher
signal-to-noise ratio in serious items.
You can read GROGGS simply by downloading and building the software (or by
using that already installed on your system by the staff or other users, if
there is any). We hope to provide a read-only WWW browsing interface, too.
In order to post items and replies to GROGGS you must use the client
software to apply for posting access. (For legal reasons this is technically
application for membership of the Society.) Access is automatically granted
to people in the cam.ac.uk domain; others must contact the editors to
register.
The GROGGS Editors can be reached at soc-grogg...@lists.cam.ac.uk. The
active editors of this version of Groggs are Martin Hardcastle, Aldabra
Stoddart and Ian Jackson, who is also responsible for the technical
development of the Groggs server.
New users should look at the rules of Groggs (currently unmodified from the
Phoenix Groggs rules).
Software
* Tcl/TclX client kit, for use on Unix systems. Contains both greadnew,
which works much like Phoenix/MVS GROGGS READNEW, and an unfinished
version of tkgroggs, an X-based program with a Motif-like interface
(based on Tk). Note that this software is still under development.
You need Tcl 7 and Extended Tcl (aka TclX) to compile greadnew, and Tk
3 or 4 for the Tk/X browser.
We were going to provide statically linked versions of the two shell
interpreter programs, rgtp-tclx and rgtp-wishx, but this wouldn't work
unless you installed the Tcl library code too. Ideas for overcoming
this hurdle are welcome.
tclgroggs is also available as a Debian Linux package.
* Greed, a Groggs client for use under GNU Emacs 19 written by Gareth
Rees.
Contributions of code (esp. clients for non-Unix systems) are greatly
appreciated. These clients are also available by anonymous ftp from
ftp.groggs.group.cam.ac.uk, in the directory /pub/groggs .
Technical data
The Distributed GROGGS system uses a central server containing all the
items. The items are accessed using the Reverse Gossip Transfer Protocol,
which is a TCP-based command-response protocol similar to Internet SMTP or
NNTP. RGTP has been allocated port number 1431 by the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority.
The RGTP server for the Cambridge GROGGS system listens on port 1431 on
rgtp-serv.groggs.group.cam.ac.uk. You should not use any name except this
alias, as the service may have to move.
* Current protocol specification (note that this is still in development;
no major changes are expected, though minor ones may occur).
* rgtp.h header file used in the GROGGS client and server code.
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Ian Jackson pp. the GROGGS editors. iw...@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
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Martin
--
Martin Hardcastle Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, Cambridge
What will survive of us is love.