h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Now that the bugs in FireFox's handling of the gopher protocol have been fixed (in FireFox 1.5) do any of you plan on visiting gopher sites

I'm asking because I am a big fan of gopher (my site is at gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/11/users/happy (you will have to copy & paste that 'cos hootoo does not parse gopher URI's )) and followed the progress of the bug fixes closely.

Gopher?

I can't access it in Opera - it say I have to specify a proxy server. In Mozilla I get a page with a big banner across the top saying "Index of gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/11/users/happy", two horizontal lines and then a big white space underneath. Oh, and in Opera I couldn't connect to any website afterwards until I closed and re-opened the browser.

Ah, Gopher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol

If your using a browser thst still does not support gopher try the online gopher proxy, that converts gopher pages to html over at http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw

Gopher...
Takes me back to when I was at university a long time ago.

Happy, are there many gopher users still out there and if so why?

There is a good few user many of whom are very vocal, which they need to be otherwise the bug in Firefox would never of been fixed. As to why, three reasons I think, 1) some of the old servers that are still on line are a great source of archive information to researchers 2) there are still new servers going up and this might be because the modern gopher servers are very easy for admin to maintain and 3) it's a fast light protocol that means it can be delivered via proxies in a wide range of formats (e.g. the HTTP proxy mentioned above (a standard feature in one of the most popular gopher servers (pygopherd) or the gopher to wap proxy).

Phil, revisit the old times, either with FireFox of the web proxy over at floodgap (link 2 or 3 post back), you know you want to

and phil, that main gopher mailing list might give you an idea of activity, it is over at http://lists.complete.org//[email protected]/index.html.gz

Hmmm - well I'll check it out in a bit... (heads off to download firefox 1.5, rather than 1.0.x as he is currently using..)

that's the spirit

I get a blank screen...

sorry, server problems try floodgap, gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/

ah...

ooh, and why would I want to "gopher"... May read up on this....

why? see post 6 and read the info on gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/

Can someone very simply tell me the name of the proxy server I should put in the 'gopher' field when I open up the proxy window in Opera preferences?

BH forget about that (unless your ISP has a proxy server) just click the link below...

http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw

So if I want to go to any gopher server (not that I'm likely to - hadn't even heard of it before this thread started), all I have to do is put the address in that field? Got it.

This is what I got when I put your gopher address in:

Floodgap Gopher proxy failure
Sorry, there was a problem accessing this resource.

connect to sdf.lonestar.org: Connection refused

Now, what do error messages like that remind me of...

Oh yeah - h2g2

major server problems today at sdf 2 out of 6 servers died

Now what does that remind me of?

Oh yeah...