What is HyperNews?

A Brief Overview

HyperNews is a cross between the hypermedia of the WWW and Usenet News. Readers can browse through the messages written by other people and reply to those messages. A forum (also called a base article) holds a tree of these messages, displayed as an indented outline that shows how the messages are related (i.e. all replies to a message are listed under it and indented). Users can become members of HyperNews or subscribe to a forum in order to get email whenever a message is posted, so they don't have to check if anything new has been added. A recipient can then send a reply email back to HyperNews, rather than finding a browser to write a reply, and HyperNews then places the message in the appropriate forum.

Currently there is not a gateway to Usenet News (but see discussion on that issue). Rather, forums and messages are maintained on a web server. Unlike most news servers, messages never expire (unless an automatic expiration feature is enabled). But like usenet articles, HyperNews messages may not be edited after being "posted". However, there are many applications where it makes sense to allow editing, so we would like to add support for that.

The source for HyperNews is avaiable to anyone who wants to download it. Please read the installation instructions and bug reporting forums.

There are several related WWW projects on collaboration that allow feedback from readers on the web.

Information on Specific HyperNews Topics

User instructions
Administrator instructions (installation)
- Base articles - how to create them
- Security issues regarding HyperNews
- Bidirectional e-mail gateway - how it works
Source - contains source code and requirements for HyperNews
- Bugs - past and present
- Version history - what was added or fixed with each release
Evolution of Information Organization - the idea behind HyperNews
Future Ideas

HyperNews is not intended to be centralized, and all articles (created here) are not on one machine (there are article and message bodies on other servers, and many other HyperNews servers have been set up). The list of responses to an article are stored on the machine that serves the article, but that centralization only applies to a single article and it cannot be avoided. Also, response bodies may be stored on the same machine, if the responder does not want to provide a URL.

Everyone is invited to install the HyperNews source on their server to begin distributing articles more widely. Distributing the articles will distribute the load and make HyperNews more scalable. Caching and replication would also help, but that will be required to make the WWW scalable in any case.

Contrary to appearances, HyperNews does not modify the base article to append responses. Instead, the HyperNews "get" routine fetches and returns the base article with the response tree appended dynamically. This is also true of responses, no matter whether you provide a URL for the body of the response or HyperNews creates a document for the body. Consequently, the body is returned from two http servers for each access. This is not desirable, but it will be unnecessary when public annotation support is added to servers and clients.

Current Scheme

HyperNews forums are hierarchically structured. A base article is considered the 0th level of the hierarchy. The top-level messages for the base article are the 1st level - they are considered responses to the base article. Responses to those messages are at the 2nd level, etc.

Each message is numbered, starting at 1 within each HyperNews node (a base article or message). All messages under an article or message are in a subdirectory, and each message has a file containing information about the message named ".html,urc". The body of a message is in the file named "-body.html". A file of pregenerated message lines is named "/responses.html".

A URL to a message looks like: ".../HyperNews/get/baseArticle/3/10/2.html". The "get" script looks up the information about the message, generates the HTML for the message body and the outline of reply messages, if any.

The "Add Message" button at the bottom of the page is the general way to add messages, responses, questions, whatever.

Another Overview of HyperNews was prepared for a talk on collaboration technologies. Another outline of HyperNews Features is also available. HyperNews is HyperDiscussion is a forum that lists several interesting uses of HyperNews, most oriented around education.

Articles with References to HyperNews

Web Annotation Service
Now This is Community by Jeff Jarvis, discusses the success of Advance Publications communities using a threaded news system, which happens to be HyperNews.

Unrelated HyperNewses

This HyperNews is not related to several other programs or systems with the same or similar name:

The windowing system, HyperNeWS, now called HyperLook.
The NNTP newsreader for Macintoshs also called HyperNews.
A news to HTML extracter by Ray Moody (moody@cray.com) called Hypernews.
hypernews parses .newsrc file and creates a file that contains all the groups, but structured as a tree and that is in HTML format. (Used to be here.)
Team America, Corp has used the term "HyperNews" for their tool that assigns numbers to identify topics of newsgroups. It is now called AmeryNews. Jim L..., email: 71774.302@CompuServe.COM
Hypermail archives email and makes it accessible via the web. HyperNews can do this now too.

Daniel LaLiberte (liberte@hypernews.org)