Hints and Tips on Using Caucus

How to Freeze an Item

When an item is frozen, no more responses can be added to it.

How to Make an Read-Only Item

There is no read-only item as such. But you can easily fake it:

I'm running Netscape Gold on Windows 3.1 and I Get General Protection Faults

Some users have mentioned this phenomenon. Try downloading the "official" UWO distribution.
You can do this as follows: If this didn't help, you have a problem. Try going to http://help.netscape.com. In the Search the Knowledge Base box type GP fault and click Search. You might get lucky.

How to Archive a Conference

There is currently no "official" way to archive a conference. However, you can archive each item with the following technique.

In your preferences (click on your highlighted name, then go to Section III: Your Settings), change Responses / Page (25 by default) to some large number. Go to the item you want to archive, and do a File->Save As from the netscape menu bar. You can then save the whole item in one go, either as plain text or HTML.

Time-out on Long Responses

We've had some problems where people compose long responses in the caucus response window and then lost it when submiting it. If you are using a modem to connect to caucus, the modem at the side of the university is set to time out after 20 minutes of idle time. Composing a message in the caucus window is local to the PC, and therefore counts as "idle" time as far as the universities modems are concerned. As a result your connection times out if the composing takes more than 20 minutes, and you loose your work.

I would strongly recommend the following, even if you do not use a modem: compose any messages that are longer than a few lines in something like Notepad, not in the caucus response window. Save the response to disk. Then post the response using the Upload buttom above the response window.

Please note that the file will have to be plain ASCII. Notepad produces plain ASCII, MSword, WordPerfect, Wordpad etc. do not (you can make them produce ASCII by using the corect Save As option).

How to Post a Power Point Presentation

Note: Power Point presentations will only be viewable by people who have a Power Point plug-in installed with their browser.