A Discussion Room is a virtual meeting room where 2 or more list members can conduct a text-based discussion in real-time.

Each list has its own separate Discussion Room available only to subscribers/owners of that list. The most effective way of using it is to email the list and pre-arrange a date/time to meet. When you enter the room your name is shown in the Participants list to the right of the page and you can see who else is in the room there.

To access the discussion room, go to the homepage of your group (https://www.JISCMail.ac.uk/yourgroupname). You are required to be a subscriber or owner of the list to enter its Discussion Room. If you are not logged in as a subscriber or owner then you will be presented with a login box. If you do not have a JISCMail password, please register.

How to enter a message in the discussion room

When you wish to say something, type it in the box at the bottom of the page, to the left of the Send button, and click on Send (you may need to click on the box with your mouse before typing). Your text will appear, along with your name, in the main discussion area above and all participants will be able to see it. You can only see discussion text from the time you enter the room.

You can go into the Discussion Room at any time, so you may wish to choose a quiet moment and experiment with some of the other features. The discussion software comes with its own help available via the Help menu.

Saving your conversation

At present a record of any discussion can be saved by any member of the list, and the list owner could be invited to place this record into the files area.

Grey box and/or encounter errors when using the Discussion Room.

The JISCmail discussion room feature uses third-party software written in a programming language called "Java". Most modern browsers support Java, and have it enabled by default, but problems can originate from older browsers and their implementations of Java.

If you are getting a grey box, have a look in your browser's settings/preferences and ensure that any option along the lines of "use Java" or "Enable Java" is ticked.

If you are getting other errors, or the grey box persists, it is recommended that you update your computer's Java. You can do that by going to http://www.java.com and choosing the "Free Download" option, which costs nothing. Contact your technical support if in doubt.

Another reported cause of the grey box is where the Java installation fails to extract proxy information from your web browser. Try opening up the Java Plug-in Control Panel (on Windows this can be found in the Windows Control Panel or it may be in your program menu), going to the Proxies tab, un-ticking the "Use Browser Settings" option and entering the address and port of your proxy (your tech support should be able to supply you with this. The address will be something like http://ourproxy.organisation.ac.uk and the port is normally 8080). Restart your browser and try entering the Discussion Room again.

In order for the discussion software to work your computer and our discussion server have to establish a two-way connection. Depending on the configuration of your organisation's firewall, your computer may be prevented from receiving a connection back from our server, and you will be unable to access the Discussion Room.

This may be part of your organisation's security policy but you could try contacting your technical support team and asking them to "allow access from realchat.jiscmail.ac.uk (130.246.192.59) on TCP port 7979".

Accessibility

At this time the Discussion Room software does not support screen-readers. You could get hold of a transcript of the discussion by asking the discussion organiser to save the text at the end of the discussion. Alternatively, the Helpline can assist.