GROGGS was a single-system discussion system on the University's mainframe, Phoenix. It had a long and murky history. Phoenix closed on September 1st 1995, and GROGGS migrated to run on a Unix system.
The Unix version of GROGGS closed on August 25 2020. Information below is provided for historical interest only.
GROGGS is different from Usenet news in a number of ways. Its concept of items provides much stronger threading than news has. Its centralised nature means that quoting of text is unnecessary and the format encourages well-thought-out replies rather than one-liners. Perhaps most importantly, there are a set of rules and editors to enforce them; this ensures a higher signal-to-noise ratio in serious items.
You can read GROGGS simply by downloading and building the software (or by using that already installed on your system by the staff or other users, if there is any). At present you can read GROGGS through the web using yarrow (see below) and this is probably the method of accessing GROGGS used by most readers.
In order to post items and replies to GROGGS you must use the client software to apply for posting access. (For legal reasons this is technically application for membership of the Society.) Access is automatically granted to people in the cam.ac.uk domain. Others may apply, and will be given access at the discretion of the editors. In general, we expect that only people with some connection with Cambridge or the University will want accounts.
New users should look at the rules of GROGGS (currently unmodified from the Phoenix GROGGS rules). The GROGGS Jargon file, largely as it was on Phoenix, is also available.
greadnew,
which works much like Phoenix/MVS GROGGS READNEW,
and an unfinished version of tkgroggs,
an X-based program with a Motif-like interface (based on Tk).
Note that this software is still under development.
You need
Tcl 7 and
Extended
Tcl (aka TclX) to compile greadnew, and
Tk 3 or 4
for the Tk/X browser.
We were going to provide statically linked versions of the two
shell interpreter programs, rgtp-tclx and
rgtp-wishx, but this wouldn't work unless you
installed the Tcl library code too. Ideas for overcoming
this hurdle are welcome.
tclgroggs is also available as a Debian Linux package.
1431 by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
The RGTP server for the Cambridge GROGGS system listens on port
1431 on rgtp-serv.groggs.group.cam.ac.uk.
You should not use any name except this alias, as the service
may have to move.
rgtp.h header file used
in the GROGGS client and server code.