The club has a discussion group (also called e-group) provided by Yahoo with the name “iwpcusers”. The E-Group can be found here .All members are recommended to subscribe to this e-group as a means of keeping in contact with announcements and either taking part in discussions or just “listening in”. Membership is restricted to members of the Isle of Wight PC User Group and there is virtually no risk that your e-mail address will be revealed to anyone or any other organisation.

To subscribe, send an e-mail to iwpcusers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com which you can do by clicking on the link above and hitting “Send”.

You should get a reply from yahoogroups asking you to confirm, so you then have to reply to that e-mail to make the confirmation. After that, your membership of the group will be confirmed. It costs nothing to subscribe.

After that you can send e-mails to everyone on the list by sending to “iwpcusers@yahoogroups.com”. Note that HTML e-mails are not recommended and attachments are not allowed except for special purposes.

Once you are a subscriber you can ask questions, raise technical problems and discus club activities whilst reading what other members are asking and doing. This is a valuable resource for the club to enable us all to participate more fully.

Registering with Yahoo

You can join any discussion group without “registering” with Yahoo. But there are some facilities provided by Yahoo that can only be accessed by registering with them. You can:

• alter your email address to which group postings are sent;
• view the archives for the discussion group;
• and can vote in a poll.

This process, which I have called “registering” requires you to go to www.yahoo.com and create for yourself an ID (identification name) and a password. You must also give your e-mail address. Although this could leave you open to spam, you have the option to say you are not interested in any of the commercial promotions. Once you have a Yahoo ID you will be invited to give your actual real name which helps to identify you in listings of members.

But you don't have to “register” if all you want to do is join the discussion group.