Table of Contents Charter Moderation Posting Guidelines Frequently Asked Questions Guest Book Post a Message... Related Sites... ...in alpha order Bishop Museum Hawaii's H-4 Hawaii OnLine Honolulu Hale LavaNet Poly. Cultural Center Star Bulletin TheBus Three-Shields Hawaii Turtle-Trax Weblopedia ...other newsgroups

Aloha  Ka-kou  ! E  Komo  Mai  ! Eh, no forget hemo  da shoes....

These pages use .GIF images to render two diacritical (accent?) marks in ways that are impossible to duplicate with the 'Latin' character-set which is the 'World-wide Internet Standard'. If you have no choice, or insist on viewing these pages with graphics off, here is a brief description of those marks as rendered here:

'okina

looks like an apostrophe, indicates a "Glottal Stop".

kahako-

is a short dash OVER vowels, making them slightly longer and of a higher pitched. I am rendering it in the ALTernate text as a dash AFTER the vowel to be highlighted.

the Charter

Suggested topics of discussion will include:

• Cultures and lifestyles of Hawai'i
  
• Music and food of Hawai'i
  
• Hawaiian language and pidgin
  
• History of Hawai'i
  
• Hawaiian sovereignty
  
  • Ha Hawai`i
  • Nation of Hawai`i
  • Ka Lahui Hawai`i
  • HSEC

• News and politics of Hawai`i
  
  • Daniel Akaka
  • Daniel Inouye

• Favorite sights, amusements, restaurants
  
• Fond reminiscences of times and things past.
  

'O-lelo Hawai'i  translation courtesy of Keao Nesmith at Hale Kuamo'o.

Provisions of this charter may be changed by vote. A proposal for a revised charter must be posted and discussed for at least three weeks. The proposal may be revised and reposted as necessary. Votes will be taken by a neutral votetaker. The revision will pass if at least 2/3 of the voters vote YES, and if there are 100 more YES votes than NO votes.

Moderation

• Kevin Chung
• Susan Jaworowski
• Lani Teshima
• Sharon Westfall
• Michael J. Wise

Articles submitted to Soc.Culture.Hawaii should be posted daily. Moderators will be guided by the prevailing sentiments of the group in their decisions to permit or refuse articles. In general, moderators are to refuse:

1. off-topic articles
2. gross profanity and indecency
3. binaries
4. advertising
   However, brief, factual announcements of concerts, hula competitions, luaus and other such events will be accepted as long as readers of the newsgroup find these announcements useful.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. My post didn't show up...
2. I got a piece of eMail from a Moderator...
3. My posts never show up, no eMail...
4. My posts show up immediately, nobody replies...
5. My posts show up more than once...

My post didn't show up...

Unlike most other newsgroups, Soc.Culture.Hawaii is moderated, which means that your articles do not immediately enter the UseNet pool for distribution throughout the Internet. When your newsReader posts an article, it is sent to a special program running on a (usually) dedicated machine at your Internet Service Provider. This special program (named something like "INN" or "C-NEWS") is called the "News Server", and it looks at the newsgroup definition and sees a special flag telling it that this is a posting to a moderated group.

The News Server will then take one last look at your article, and forward it almost instantly as a piece of eMail to the "Submission Address", which, by the way, is:

     soc-culture-hawaii@moderators.isc.org

whereupon it is .forward-ed to the real submission address which is... oh never mind. Anyway, there your article waits until one of the five moderators checks in. What happens next depends on what you have submitted.

Assuming that your article is deemed appropriate for the group, the moderator will then send it to a special program which reformats it as a valid POST to a moderated newsgroup, and injects it into the UseNet system, where it then propagates throughout the Internet (and the world).

Where you are posting from will determine how long it takes for the article to appear after a moderator has approved it. If you are in Hawai'i, it should appear within 15-20 minutes of the moderator approving it. If you are in Vancouver, BC (like I *was*), it could take an additional 15 minutes, or -if your ISP's feed is really bad- up to 5 additional days. Unfortunately, that's life. Consider before you curse this too much that, if you are posting to an unmoderated group, that it will take almost the same amount of time before anyone would see your post anyway, and the same amount of time for their reply to reach your site, thus doubling the time to see any response.

There are remedies that will reduce the amount of time required for articles to propagate through the system, and we are currently experimenting with them, so please be patient, we're not finished yet!

I got a piece of eMail from a Moderator...

That's probably self-explanitory telling you why your article isn't going to be posted. Or, from time to time, we might respond personally to articles that pass our way with helpful comments, especially if time appears to be of the essence.

My posts never show up, no eMail...

Hmmm. Well, there are a few possible reasons for that. If you have been able to submit before, then that means that your ISP has probably got the submission address correct, so we'll discount that. We'll also assume that your article wasn't something which a moderator would take one look at and file in the trash without even bothering to eMail you back. So, what else could have gone worng...?

From time to time, the newsServer at your site (or the site where Soc.Culture.Hawaii "lives") could break, and perhaps nobody notices it. If this happens, you will notice that nothing else is showing up in the group either.

There are two other possible causes. One is called the "Quote.Cop", and he *WAS* a special option compiled into the newsServer at our site which counts up the number of lines in a post starting with >, and if they made up more than 50% of the lines in the post, then the newsServer software would NOT allow the article to be posted. For this reason, some of the moderators will habitually edit the quoting characters of your posts to remove any of the characters that attract ... "his" attention. Notice the use of the PAST TENSE. This option *MAY* still be turned on again in the future.

It would be best if you kept the quoted/total ratio down yourself, 'cause in the not-too-distant future, the "Quote-Cop" may return, and we probably won't be so helpful.

Finally (and this one is a killer for 'O-lelo Hawai'i  ), characters with ascii values above 127 seem to have a really hard time on UseNet. If a post contains any special characters, like those required to correctly represent 'O-lelo Hawai'i  , the post will most likely die. From time to time, "We conducting research..."

My posts show up immediately, nobody replies...

This is a potential symptom that your ISP has not set up their newsServer correctly, and has not marked the newsGroup as moderated. So, your post appears (locally) immediately. Then, your ISP attempts to share it with another one of its "peers" (another newsServer running at a pseudo-friendly ISP) that is correctly configured, and that server "drops it on the floor", which is Internet parlance for... your article disappears and is never seen or heard from again.

Complain. This is a symptom of a deeper problem (your ISP doesn't take its newsFeed seriousely), and if they don't fix the problem, consider changing ISP's.

Authoritative Evidence (scroll to the bottom)

My posts show up more than once...

Er, yes, well, uh... yeah. It seems that the piece of software that actually does the injection into UseNet, from time to time, has a little "burp" just before it finishes, and so it doesn't remove the article, and 15 minutes later, the system attempts to post it again.

This appears to be fixed now...

Back in the days when this was a major problem, it was referred to as the "Geist" (as in "Poldergeist"), and in-jokes sometimes still refer to it. In honor of a certain personality who was instrumental in the creation of the predecessor group (ACH), the "Geist" has been nicknamed "Eric". (8-)

Guest Book