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From: Mitchell Wand <wand@ccs.neu.edu>
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Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 16:06:12 -0400 (EDT)
To: faculty@ccs.neu.edu
Subject: Re: discussion group software?
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Some time ago I wrote:

> From: Mitchell Wand <wand@ccs.neu.edu>
> To: faculty@ccs.neu.edu <faculty@ccs.neu.edu>
> Date: Sunday, September 10, 2000 10:28 PM
> Subject: discussion group software?

>Has anyone here used any web-based or other software for course
>discussion groups?
>
>I've been using ccs.courses.* newsgroups, but that tends to be a
>one-way medium:  nobody but me ever posts.  Also, there are
>maintenance problems, so that this is not even very good as an archive
>of my announcements.
>
>Has anyone had any success in fostering student-to-student electronic
>discussion?
>
>--Mitch
>

David Blank-Edelman has pointed me at a program called hypermail,
which can be used to organize mail archives.  

I've attached this to the com3352 mailing list; to see the results,
look at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/com3352/archive .

hypermail has a zillion options, but a very simple set-up file will do
the trick.  I did it by writing a configuration file

/home/wand/courses/com3352/etc/hypermail.config

(which I actually modified from one of dnb's that I found)

I initialized the archive from an old mail archive using the script in

/home/wand/courses/com3352/etc/initialize-mail-archive

and then I feed mail to it by putting an appropriate line in
/ccs/adm/aliases/com3352 , so that all mail to the com3352 address
gets archived :

|"/arch/unix/bin/hypermail -c /home/wand/courses/com3352/etc/hypermail.config"

This should be enough to get anyone started on this.  If you want to
see more, say "man hypermail" or check out www.hypermail.org .

Thanks to dnb for pointing me at this.

--Mitch