customize discussion groups?

[Bruce Cornett]

All

I have a client that wants to allow persons to post to news items, etc. 
without being a member. I have suggested this might be problematic.  His 
response is that the interface is very un intuitive. If you are not a 
member, there is no dialog presented that says - "sign up now so you can 
post a response now that you have hit the "discuss link" and find there is 
nothing to discuss and no instructions on what to do".

I have to agree that it is not intuitive to the average person who is 
browsing the web.

I have looked all about and found only one piece of info re: customizing 
discussion groups and it is very old. Which brings me to my second issue, 
generally speaking, as a newbie, I am having a hard time discerning the 
direct relevance of the older postings to version 9.

An example is this story (6/21/99 Customizing Discussion Groups Brent 
Simmons)- the only one I have found on customization - refers to 
htmlInterfaces.root, which doesn't exist on my Frontier 9 installation.

So my question is two-fold.

First, is there a graceful way to allow my client to open his discussion 
groups to non-members - or in the alternative - a graceful way to enhance 
the dialog to make it more obvious to the page viewer that you have to join 
to participate?

Second, is there a comprehensive set of current documentation for persons 
who have not "grown up" with the product?   Or in the alternative, perhaps 
an index, preferably one that was relevant only to the current version?

And while I am thinking about it, what about a comprehensive sysadmin 
document - something that tells us what we need to do to ensure the safety 
of our clients' data - how to recover from errors - rebuild indexes (are 
there indexes?) - "pack" tables - all that sort of stuff that would help us 
sleep better?

And are there any stats on performance - how many manila sites per server 
before performance starts to drag - how effective is using a second server 
to store picture and gems in increasing performance?

Oh, and is there a macro that will parse the list of sites by date that 
would make it easy to determine when a "first month is free" site is up for 
renewal?  I have a lot of questions:)

Or am I just being dense?

Bruce C