Two things we wanted to be able to offer club members are a free email account and personal home pages.

The email program connected to these forums, Hivemail, is being offered for a limited time to everyone. Eventually, a free email account will only be available with a club membership. We're not sure yet whether we'll keep Hivemail, so please don't get too attached to it. It could be that it will allow too much spam through to the server. We'll see. It may be that we'll get rid of it and offer full email accounts. That would allow us to use our other server as well and extend the domain offerings to @sobercafe.org and @trudgers.org, both a bit more attractive than the longer @onlinealano.org. The other server also features user-configurable antivirus protection and Spamassassin. Let us know what you think.

Within the next couple of days, we'll have installed a program, EZHost, that allows members to build their own web pages. This will also be useful for groups that meet at the club, so they can post information about their meetings, formats, etc. The program we found is, amazingly, simple to use. No html coding knowledge necessary. Pages can be created using a text editor, or the usual way -- by hand coding, or they can be created on someone's computer and uploaded to a private web space.