______________________________________________________________________ Participating in Conferences Conferences are special interest areas containing messages you can browse and respond to. They’re similar to mailboxes, but groups of people can access them. FirstClass tracks which items you have read and marks unread items with an asterisk (*). To participate in a conference, you need to be able to read the items in a conference and contribute new items or respond to current items. FirstClass provides a simple way to do all of these things. ____________________ Browsing conferences Your FirstClass administrator places on your desktop any conferences to which you have access. Conferences can be arranged hierarchically. For example, the Conferences folder contains all publicly-available conferences. To browse the conferences on your system, start at your desktop and type CONFERENCES or the number of the Conferences item. To open a conference, type the name of the conference or its number. A list of the items in the conference appear. The list shows who sent each item, the approximate size of the item in thousands of characters, the date it was contributed and the subject of the item. Unread items are marked with an asterisk (*). You can open an item by typing its number. The items appear on the screen with a pause every 20 lines or so. A [more] prompt is displayed at each pause; press the space bar to continue. When the item has been displayed, you can type another number or type SCAN to list the conference items again. Type EXIT to leave the conference. Type EXIT again to return to your desktop. ____________________________ Contributing to a conference To contribute an item to a conference, you can create a message and address it explicitly to the conference, using the conference name. Alternatively, you can type COMPOSE after opening the conference, and a new message will be created which is automatically addressed to the conference. See the "Composing a Message" help file for more details. _____________________________ Replying to a conference item To send a reply to an existing conference item, type REPLY. When you type REPLY alone, FirstClass replies to the item you have most recently read. You can reply to other items by specifying a message number (for example, REPLY 6 to reply to item number 6).