Alternate forum access for donors

This will have to make it into the manual at some point but I suspect it's going to need some screenshots to help the technologically challenged along so I'm going to post the basics here in text and people can play with it if they want and if someone else goes and makes better instructions in the manual before I get around to it so much the better.

The access is through NNTP and it's available starting at the $30 donation level. It doesn't touch the main server at all so shouldn't cause load problems there but it is somewhat more limited in the amount of connections it can handle at once which is why it's just for donors. It will allow you to read/respond to messages and forum posts through any standard newsreader (or things like Firebird that allow subscribing via NNTP).

Here's the basic settings, where they go will depend on the client. Server is forum.movoda.net and you need to authenticate with your game username/password and then you should be able to subscribe to various forums and you inbox/outbox. Reading should be fairly simple, just be careful when subscribing to some forums as it may take a long time to sync the first time (Off-Topic comes to mind).

Responding should work as long as you set it up to send through the same NNTP connection as the incoming. You'll notice that player names get converted into fully qualified addresses, but enough characters are dropped that they are not necessarily unique and the system ignores them, they are just there for your use to see who wrote the post and formatted that way so that newsreaders don't have a problem with them. The actual response is routed based on what it is a reply to. For forum threads you can reply to any post in the thread and it will be added as the next post at the bottom, anything posted into a forum group that is not a reply will create a new thread. In your inbox any reply to a message will send a message back to the person it came from, anything posted that is not a reply is dropped, there is no way to send a message that is not back to someone you have heard from before through that interface. You cannot post anything to the outbox.

Any general questions feel free to put them here and if I can't help maybe someone with the same newsreader can. I've tested with a number of clients now but it does only really support a small subset of the proper NNTP protocol so it's possible other clients will try something I haven't run into yet. Don't think you can hurt anything by playing with it so if you're interested in that sort of thing feel free to give it a try, I've grown rather fond of flagging messages different colors as they come in and keeping track of them that way.

From mskwik

Looks something like this for me, but I rather doubt most people will be using Claws so instructional screenshots from there aren't going to help a whole lot.

From Infopumper

I have created a Page with Screenshots for users of outlook Express to be able to use this new feature..
The Link:
http://members.cox.net/infopumper/NNTP.htm

Just to remind everyone. The Outlook express is a Free application that comes with Windows.