Fox Cities Online Changes
 

12/13/2001

We have made a new service available to you that we hope you will find useful. It is web browser based email. You can use this system instead of a separate email program, or in addition to what you are using now. The advantages of this system are that you don't need to install & configure a separate program for email, and also that you can now access your mail from anywhere you can use a web browser. Just connect to the internet as you always do, or go to any public access internet location - many public libraries throughout the world provide public internet access. Then open any web browser, Internet Explorer or Netscape for example, and go to http://mail.focol.org.

You will find a page with a login box where you can type your FOCOL username and press enter. Another dialog will ask again for your username and FOCOL password. Once into the system, you will be able to receive, read, reply, send and manage your mail messages on FOCOL. It's easy to use, and your mail is kept on the server until you delete it, allowing you to get to it from anywhere.

Along with this change, we have made some other changes to the way mail works on FOCOL. Up until now, you have been able to receive AND send mail from your focol account by setting any mail client to use the mail.focol.org server for both incoming and outgoing mail. This has been convenient, but unfortunately allowing this has made FOCOL vulnerable to "remailers" - people on the net who didn't have a FOCOL account but who could use FOCOL to send "spam".

Recently we were hit by some very significant attacks from remailers. They clogged our system, and their activities caused FOCOL to be reported to some watchdog agencies as allowing "open relaying". Some local ISPs, including Roadrunner, have stopped allowing their customers to receive mail from anyone on FOCOL because of this.

We have fixed the problem on FOCOL, but the fix may require some changes on your part. If you have "mail.focol.org" entered as your mail server for SMTP or outgoing mail in your email client this will no longer work. You will need to change that setting to be the name of the mail server of whatever ISP you are using for your internet connection. For example, if you connect to the Internet through Athenet, you should use mail.athenet.net as your SMTP mail server. If you are not sure of the name of your ISPs mail server, you should ask them. You will still use FOCOL as your POP3 or incoming mail server, and you can still set your return address as your FOCOL address.

Over the next few weeks we will be working with the ISPs that we identify that have cut off FOCOL mail and asking them to restore service. We hope that they will do so once they are able to verify that we have fixed the problems. If you find that you are unable to send mail to certain domains, please let us know about it. I hope that this will all be resolved in a very short time.

11/2/2001

For our users: If you are trying to get to a page on one of your organization's websites that you have bookmarked and are getting error messages, it may be because of the changes we have made on FOCOL. If your bookmarked URL looks like this: http://www.focol.org/~username/file.html try changing it to http://www.focol.org/username/file.html The reason you are having trouble is that we are no longer using the tilde (~) in our usernames. There are referral pages at the old "home" page address of each FOCOL web, but not at every old page address.

10/9/2001

Most of the problems with the transition have been resolved. Mail should be working for everyone, but the web-based mail is still not ready. Use statistics are now available, beginning October 9, 2001.

Some of you still have copies of the old FOCOL logo on your sites. Please check that the logo you are displaying is the same as what you see at the top of this page. If it is not, we suggest that you place the new logo on your page by relative reference instead of making an additional copy. That way, if we change it, you won't have to change your page again. The code for calling the FOCOL logo from any website on the FOCOL server would look like this: <img src="../images/littlogo.gif">

9/17/2001

We are having some problems with the Web Based email program. For the time being, you should be able to collect mail using your mail client that you have been using with the old system, but the web mail at http://mail.focol.org isn't working tonight. The mail server is mail.focol.org for your Eudora or other POP email client.

9/14/2001 Welcome!

It looks like we've made it to the new system finally, after a few glitches along the way. Here's what we think should be happening:

The world should see the new FOCOL website when going to http://www.focol.org

They should find your organizational website when going to either your old URL that looked something like http://www.focol.org/~youroldusername or when going to a new URL that looks like http://www.focol.org/yourusernameonthenewsystem

You can collect your mail by pointing a web browser to http://mail.focol.org You should also be able to use any email client to collect mail as you have in the past. The mail server is mail.focol.org

You can update your website hosted by FOCOL by pointing your ftp client to www.focol.org

Your username and password are the same as they were in most cases. If your password doesn't work, or if anything else doesn't work the way you expect it to, please contact me at bkelly@apl.org

Please read the previous messages for other information about the changes in the new system.

9/11/2001

If you are seeing this page, then we have made the change over to the new system. Most things seem to be working quite well over here.

One thing that we have discovered is that some of you may have problems with some of your links to images and files within your own website. Here's what's going on:

If you made "absolute" pathname references for your images or your links, they won't work correctly on the new system. An "absolute" reference would look something like these:


<a href="http://www.focol.org/~yourusername/file.html">Link</a>
or
<image src="http://www.focol.org/~yourusername/images/picture.gif">

If you have used this type of reference you will need to change the "~yourusername" part to the new non-tilde form for this to work. Alternatively, you can change the references to be "relative" references. These would look something like this:

<a href="file.html">Link</a>
or
<image src="images/picture.gif">

9/6/2001

We are about ready to make the big change over to the new FOCOL System! Early the week of September 10th, we will be switching off the old system and bringing up the new one. I hope that the entire process will go smoothly and that you will find the new system easier than ever to use. We hope that most of the changes will be transparent to you.

PLEASE DO NOT MAKE ANY CHANGES TO YOUR WEBSITE AFTER THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, UNTIL YOU RECEIVE ANOTHER MESSAGE FROM US. WE HOPE TO BE AVAILABLE AGAIN FOR YOU BY TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11th. YOUR EMAIL SHOULD CONTINUE TO BE AVAILABLE DURING THE TRANSITION, THOUGH MESSAGES LEFT ON THE SERVER MAY BE LOST ONCE WE TURN OFF THE OLD SYSTEM.

Along the way, if there are any problems or changes, we'll post announcements on the FOCOL home page at http://www.focol.org That page should be available throughout the process, and it will change to the new version when the cutover is made.

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For those of you who want more information, here are a few details to help you understand any changes you might find once we come up on the new system.

Your username and password should in most cases be the same as they were on the old FOCOL system. If you requested a new username on our survey, I've set that one up, using the password you had on the old system. In a few cases I was unable to find your old password, so I created a new one. If you can't log in, please call me at the number listed below. You may set your ftp program to connect to either www.focol.org or ftp.focol.org.

When you login the first time after the change you will be placed in your home directory. This is the only place you will be permitted to save files.

Your old URL was something like www.focol.org/~yourusername In all cases, that URL should go to your new directory on the new system also. You may also use a new URL, like www.focol.org/yourusername (without the tilde). If when you filled out the survey you requested a new username, then the non-tilde form of your URL will use that new username.

I will copy all of your website files over from the old system to the new one. They should all be in your directories in the same structure as before. The only difference is that we will no longer need to use the "public_html" directory. Your web files are at the first level inside of your "home" directory. This may mean that if you have your ftp program set up to go to a specific path on the old server that it will give you some sort of error message when trying to connect to the new server. I'd recommend cleaning out the path if you have one set, and letting the system put you in the right place.

Mail will now be available via any web browser. Once we're over to the new system and the domain name is changed over, you will be able to point any browser to mail.focol.org, where there will be further instructions about reading and managing your FOCOL mail account. If you have been using an email client to collect mail from the old FOCOL system, that should still work with the new system also. The name of the mail server is: mail.focol.org.

Most everything else is the same or more flexible than it was in the past. If you encounter any difficulties or have questions, please call or email me. I appreciate your patience with us during this change. Soon we will be able to offer a wider range of services to FOCOL information providers that I hope you will find worth waiting for.

Thank you for making FOCOL your Community Network!

Fox Cities Online Home
Last Updated: 24-Jun-2002