Using Paul Steinfort & Associates Online Forums

Introduction

Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forums (no longer active) are an efficient means for organizing multiple discussions. Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forum is actually a conventional newsgroup, served from a standard NNTP server. It is not replicated to the UseNet newsgroups, so you must contact our server at forums.psaproject.com to access it.
If you have never used an online forum or newsgroups before, this document will instruct you on how to set up the Netscape and Microsoft newsreaders.

If you are an experienced newsreader user, you can skip this document. We recommend that you use a newsreader that can follow URL links. We refer to Web pages in our postings, and it's much better if you can just double-click on URLs to visit them.

Accessing Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forums
To access the online forums, you need to:

1 Obtain a news reader. Internet Explorer comes with "Outlook Express" and Netscape Communicator (but not Netscape Navigator 4) comes with "Collabra Discussion Groups". Many other fine packages are available.

2 Add forums.psaproject.com as a news server(no longer active). Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forums are not part of the standard USENET set of newsgroups so you must contact our news server for them. You should be able to automatically access the newsgroups by clicking on the links to the groups from our Web site, or clicking here

3 Subscribe to the forum.

4 Read and navigate the forums, and then post or respond to a message.



Add forums.psaproject.com as a news server   Top

To Add forums.psaproject.com as a news server, do the following:

Click news://forums.psaproject.com.au/epm . This link should automatically open your newsreader if you have one and take you to the appropriate group. If it does not, then you need to manually access the forums, which can be done with the steps outlined below.

If you are located behind a firewall which prevents you from entering Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forums, please contact your company's helpdesk or information systems group to see if there is any way to bypass the firewall.

Subscribing to your favorite forum(s)   Top
To find and subscribe to those groups, do the following:

In Microsoft Outlook Express:

  1. Choose Tools > Newsgroups.
  2. Click on the icon for the forums.psaproject.com.au server, then click Reset List to get an updated list of newsgroups.
  3. Select each group to which you want to subscribe, and click Subscribe.

    Now you are ready to start reading the posts in the groups.

In Microsoft Internet Explorer:

  1. In the main newsreader window, click the newsgroups button in the toolbar.
  2. In the left column, click on the server "forums.psaproject.com.au". If this server is not listed, see "Accessing Newsgroups via Microsoft Internet Explorer" in this document.
  3. After clicking on the forums.psaproject.com.au server, you should now see a list of the groups you can subscribe to.
  4. Highlight the ones you are interested in and click the Subscribe button. Click OK back to the main newsreader window.

In Netscape Navigator:

  1. In the upper left window, scroll down to the forums.psaproject.com.au folder.
  2. Click once on the arrow next to the forums.psaproject.com.au folder. A series of subnewsgroups should list. These are the actual newsgroups.
  3. In order to not have to do this entire process each time you want to check the groups, you will want to subscribe to only those you are interested in. To do this, click the checkmark to the right of the group you are interested in subscribing to. There should now be a checkmark to the right of each group you want.
  4. Go to Options > Show Subscribed Groups. Now all the other groups should disappear leaving only those groups you chose to subscribe to.

Reading and navigating through the forums   Top
To read and navigate through the groups, do the following:

In Microsoft Internet Explorer:

  1. In the main window, click on the newsgroups field and scroll through the various groups. Choose the one you want by highlighting it.
  2. In the Subject box, you'll see a list of headers. Each of these corresponds to a full text message. Click on the one you want.
  3. In the box below is the body of the message.

In Netscape Navigator:

  1. In the left window, click on the group you are interested in reading. In the right panel, you should now see a list of headers. Essentially, this is a listing of all the posts currently in the group. A header is similar to the subject line of an e-mail.
  2. When you find a specific post you are interested in reading, click on it. In the lower box, the actual text of the message will appear.
  3. Sometimes you will need to load new messages. When you restart Netscape Navigator, it does not automatically get the new messages since the last time you read. To update the group, go to File > Get More messages.


Posting and responding to messages    Top

  1. If you want to post or respond to a group, press the appropriate button on the toolbar.
    You may:
  2. Post a new message (create a new thread).
  3. Reply to a newsgroup thread in the group.
  4. Reply to a post via the author's e-mail address.
  5. Reply to both the newsgroup and the author.

Outlook Express Users

If you encounter a message when posting or responding to messages that says:
" The message could not be sent. No sender was specified. Please check you News Account configuration."
you will need to fill in name and email address information for the news account. To do this, do the following:

  1. Go to Tools > Accounts and click the News tab.
  2. Click on forums.psaproject.com.au, and then click Properties.
  3. In the General Tab, enter your name and your email address.
  4. Click OK all the way back to the main window. Now you will be able to post and reply to messages.

If the hyperlinks do not automatically open the newsreader in your browser, you will need to do the following:    Top

Accessing Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forums via Microsoft Outlook Express
To view the forums, do the following:

  1. In Outlook Express, choose Tools > Accounts... > Add > News...
  2. Go through the wizard that pops up. Enter forums.psaproject.com.au as the "Internet News Server Name". This is a separate news server hosted by Paul Steinfort & Associates.
  3. Finish the rest of the wizard. Outlook Express should automatically ask if you want to download the list of newsgroups and present you a dialog showing the newsgroups.

Accessing Paul Steinfort & Associates/s Online Forums via Microsoft Internet Explorer
To view the forums, do the following:

  1. With Internet Explorer open, go to Mail > Read news.
  2. If you've never used the newsreader in Internet Explorer, a wizard will pop up leading you through the preliminaries.
  3. After the wizard you should now be at a window entitled "newsgroups". Click OK to exit this.
  4. Go to News > Options and click the Servers tab.
  5. Under the News Server box click the Add button.
  6. In the News Server box enter forums.psaproject.com.au. This is a separate news server hosted by Paul Steinfort & Associates. Your ISP won't be able to duplicate this set of groups so you have to enter it as its own server.
  7. Click OK all the way back to the main window.

Accessing Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forums via Netscape Communicator 4
To view forums, do the following:

  1. With Netscape Communicator open, choose Communicator > Collabra Discussion Groups. This will open the Netscape Message Center.
  2. Choose File > New Discussion Group Server... from the Message Center window's menu. Enter forums.psaproject.com.au in the Server field, and click OK.
  3. In the list of newsgroups that appears, expand "Paul Steinfort & Associates", select each forum to which you want to subscribe, and click Subscribe. If you don't see a particular group, you may need to click "Get Groups" to get a new list of groups.

Accessing Paul Steinfort & Associates's Online Forums via Netscape Navigator 3
To view forums, do the following:

  1. With Netscape Navigator open, Go to Window > Netscape News.
  2. When you open the News browser, you'll see three windows. If it isn't already pointing down, click on the arrow or plus sign next to the default news host.
  3. You should be automatically subscribed to at least three newsgroups. You may unsubscribe to them by clicking on the checkmark to the right. If you are new to newsgroups, we highly recommend you continue subscribing and reading to familiarize yourself with newsgroup process, function, and etiquette.
  4. Click once on the default news host icon in the left window.
  5. Go to Options | Show All Newsgroups. You should now notice the progress monitor in the lower corner of Netscape Navigator moving. It is uploading all the newsgroups that your server has - probably around 16000. This may take awhile but only needs to be done once and you won't need all of these.
  6. If you don't see a series of new icons, then you probably need to refresh your screen. Click on the default news host icon again and go to Options > Show All Newsgroups again. This should show a series of new groups.

    Netscape Navigator organizes the newsgroups into folders sorted by their first word. Most newsgroups begin with either alt.*, comp.*, biz.* and so forth. All of the newsgroups that begin with a certain prefix will be organized into one folder.