Hotline is a new bulletin-board system, or BBS, in a preliminary Windows release based on a Mac program. "Turn every connected workstation into a member of a ubiquitous distributed data warehouse." Any PC can be a server, setup is easy, bandwidth is dynamically variable, you get chat board, messaging, and file upload/download, and the multimedia downloads are said to be 30%-40% faster than with FTP. It's not as fancy as some of the alternative systems, though. Hotline says it has logged over 2M downloads from its website, . [Wired News, wwwedu, 01Oct98. net-hap.] (One reason for a recent surge of interest in BBSs is that they are not covered by the new US "online decency" law unless they use TCP/IP. Hotline uses TCP/IP, but is still said to have "spawned a cult following among software pirates, pornographers, and the hacker underground.")

WikiWiki and its clones are are collaborative systems for discussion on the web, similar to IRC chat groups. The original is used for discussion of patterns in OO design; one of the clones covers the JOS Java operating system. . Another such program is . [ and Rick Harker, comp.ai, 29Sep98. David Joslin.]

OneListAddicts is a discussion list about WWW mailing lists, particularly those hosted at OneList. It will likely include announcements of the new OneList lists each day. . [Amy J. , NEW-LIST, 22Oct98.]

If you alter your email address to thwart spammers, mung the domain name: yourname@-REMOVE_THIS-example.com instead of yourname-SPAMBLOCK-@example.com. This avoids making your provider's email server -- and all those along the mail path, and perhaps even your postmaster -- handle undeliverable mail. There will still be a burden on Internet domain servers, but they can be set up to handle the error without too much load. Even better is an invalid address syntax such as "yourname(AT)example(DOT)com" or "see_my_sig_for_my_address". Don't use "nowhere.com" as an address, as there really is such a recipient. [Bill Park , 19Oct98.]