Baen's Bar: Instructions for the new bar

Getting on the new bar for existing barflies

Using NNTP

You must already have reset your password on the new bar.

In the control panel of the web bar, you must have changed your password from the temp password you were mailed to something else. NNTP passwords are only sync'ed by the process of doing a password change!

Grab a newsreader program (I use Thunderbird for NNTP but there are a variety of newsreaders out there).
In your newsreader program add bar.baen.com (or 50.56.217.114) as your news server.
You will be prompted for a username/password. Use your web-login username and the password you changed to in the web bar control panel.
Tell your newsreader to fetch the list of newsgroups and subscribe to any groups you like.

That's it. The bar is sync'ed backwards and forwards to the NNTP server once a minute. Your nntp posts should appear on the bar within a minute of your posting them. Bar posts should be available to your newsreader within a minute of them being posted to the bar.

Unlike prior incarnations of the bar, the news server has both the horsepower and the bandwidth to not lock up if you choose to download a lot of history from a newsgroup. This time it was done right.

A word of warning

When posting in NNTP you must supply a name and e-mail address. In order to go from the NNTP system to the web bar, those must fufill one of three criteria:

Your name can match your web login username or
Your name can match the "alias" set in the web bar control panel or
Your e-mail address can match your web e-mail address

If none of those match then your post will only appear in NNTP/email and not on the web, which is 'bad' because it will cause threading to break down on the web forum and the web forum will not be in sync with email and NNTP. Then, if people reply to your posts, and those replies get to the web, there is no message on the web bar for them to be in reply to, and a new thread gets started. The technical term for this is 'bad'.

If you consistently act badly, steps will have to be taken.

Still, the requirements are simple and the new NNTP server is fast and the syncing (within the limits mentioned above) is effective.

What to do next?

But most important, enjoy yourself!