how to participate in this e-conference

The e-conference is moderated forum. The advantage of this is clearly that the conference organisers can check the quality of the contributions before they are made public through this web site.

registration and signing in

It is also necessary to register before being able to submit messages, or to look at the messages of the discussion board. Once again, this decision was taken in order to increase the quality of the conference. All registered users will receive, if they wish so, an email message with a summary of the discussions of the previous day. It is not necessary to register to be able to view the summaries of the discussions.

Our server keeps track of your session by setting a non-permanent cookie - the cookie is created when you log on, but is not written to disk, and only remains active during the current browser session. We store session information to allow us to calculate some summary statistics, and to do quality control on the technical aspects of the conference. Information on individual sessions will never be made public.

The web site will check whether there are new messages. It does this by comparing the data and time of the current browser session (as detected during log in) with date and time of the session when the message was created. The 'new' flag will only disappear after closing the browser, and logging on again (thereby forcing a new session).

posting messages

Please keep the messages short and to the point; this is to be a discussion board, not a forum for long monologues. Also, avoid introducing two different ideas in one message: this would make it more difficult to manage the chain of replies to a message.

To add a message, first go to a 'topic' within a forum, then select 'add message'. Enter the text of your message in the text box; use 'return' to start a new paragraph, not for a new line.

It is not possible to edit a message once it has been posted, unless you are a moderator of the forum.

To respond to a message, first open the message, then click 'respond'. The chain of responses is visually displayed when listing all messages belonging to a topic.

Problems, questions ? Please contact the board administrator.