Hypernews is a great tool. It is like a bulletin board type system for posting messages. It goes beyond that though in allowing different configuration possibilities for commands. It has features like deletion of messages, notification by email of responses, you can move responses around in structures, you can post in html,smart text, plain text or just drag in a url from the net.
Hypernews has been an ongoing project and they put out updates quite often. Some of the future directions, include both adding mailing list capabilties and a usenet news gateway. Check out the hypernews pages to see it in all of it's glory and then check out some of our "other uses" for hypernews.
If you want to install hypernews please let us know. We can give you a directory through our version of hypernews or you can install your own if you would like to play with the scripts. The only difference is that we run the hypernews forums through a different web server for security reasons. HyperNews comes with built in security and needs to be run differently than the other web server. Only difference in the urls would be a port number so domain.com/whatever.html becomes domain.com:8080/whatever.html
You will be able to create as many different forums as you like with our version of hypernews, but you could change it more to fit your themes with your own version of the scripts. Since we run a different web server we would like for you to run your scripts out of the other web servers directories also. It is a great tool for whenever you need a posting mechanism in a page.
other usesThe Show Machine
I used hypernews along with our Grateful Dead set-list machine to give me a response forum so deadheads could post comments about that show, etc. The forum is created on the fly.
The Forest
I used hypernews in combination with a mailing list and hypermail to make the forest. This way either folks on the mailing list or web surfers who just stopped by, can post to the mailing list and hypermail archives it all.