[cam-users] Announcing the new CAM bulletin board

[Jim McCaa]

The AMWG is pleased to announce the availability of a new CAM bulletin board 
-- this interactive web site will be the new location for announcements, user 
support, and user-to-user communication concerning all topics related to 
NCAR's Community Atmosphere Model (CAM).

Please visit the new site at:
http://bb.cgd.ucar.edu/index.php?c=2

The arrival of the bulletin board will bring several important changes to how 
our users ask and answer CAM-related questions, as well as how information 
from NCAR is disseminated to the user community.

In the long run, we anticipate that the cam-users mailing list will become a 
low-traffic mailing list for announcements regarding CAM from NCAR; 
subscription  to cam-users will be completely unnecessary for users of the 
bulletin board.  

In order to take full advantage of the bulletin board, we ask that you 
register at the site.  When you do so, you will have the option to receive 
email digests summarizing activity at the site.  If you choose to receive 
digests, you won't need to check the site regularly for updates.  However, 
even if you don't, you can elect to be notified if someone posts an answer to 
a query you've made.

PLEASE NOTE THAT IF YOU HAVE ALREADY REGISTERED WITH THE CCSM BULLETIN BOARD 
FORUM THAT YOU WILL NEED TO REVISIT THE SITE AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE CAM FORUMS 
AS WELL, AND INDICATE YOUR PREFERENCES WITH RESPECT TO DAILY DIGESTS.

In order to encourage cam-users participants to use the new bulletin board, 
cam-users will immediately:
1) begin sending a daily digest of bulletin board activity.
2) become a moderated list.

For a short period of time, we will still allow users to send mail to 
cam-users, though we discourage you from doing so!  Please try out the 
bulletin board instead.  In fact, if you elect to receive email digests from 
the bulletin board, you may wish to unsubscribe to cam-users.

The information distributed to the "General announcments" section will at some 
point duplicate the information sent to cam-users.  For the moment we are 
going to send daily digests of all postings from all CAM forums to the 
cam-users mailing list, but at some point this feature will go away and 
cam-users will only be used for major announcements.

Here is how you sign up to receive bulletin board digests:
Near the top of the bulletin board web page, you will see a link named 
"Digests".  Click on this to get to the email digest configuration page.  
Once there, you will have several choices about the type of digest to 
receive, and how often one will be sent.  If you wish to be informed of all 
CAM-related activity, we recommend subscribing to the following forums:

General Announcements
Dynamical Formulations
Frequently asked Questions/Getting Started/Troubleshooting
Physics and Parameterizations
Software Engineering/Design
Using the Single Column Model (SCAM) and Column Radiation Model (CRM)
Working with input datasets for CAM
Working with output datasets from CAM/Diagnosing the model

Users of the coupled modeling system (CCSM) may wish to subscribe to those 
forums as well.

In addition to the bulletin board, there remain two other important sources of 
information about CAM: 

The CAM Home Page -- The main CAM web page with documentation, source code, 
control simulations, etc.

The cam-users mailing list -- cam-users will become a low-traffic mailing list 
for announcements regarding CAM from NCAR; subscription to cam-users will be 
completely unnecessary if you are subscribed to the "General Announcements" 
forum.

To unsubscribe to the cam-users mailing list, please go to its web page:
http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cam-users

Please let us know (via the bulletin board, if possible!) what you think of 
the new site.

Thanks,

Jim McCaa