Join The NEURON Forum!

Do you have a question about how to use NEURON?
Are you interested in sharing useful tips with other NEURON users?
Would you like to hear about the latest revisions and program features?
Do you want to stay informed about upcoming NEURON courses?
Or are you just interested in computational neuroscience in general?

Then we invite you to use The NEURON Forum. If you are interested in a particular topic, you can search the Forum for information about it. If you don't find the answer you need, or if you want to start a discussion on a relevant topic, feel free to register with the Forum and post a message.

"What is The NEURON Forum?"

The NEURON Forum is an on-line "bulletin board" whose primary goal is to serve as a convenient environment for open discussions on topics that are of interest to NEURON users. We also hope it will foster the productive use of computational modeling in neuroscience in general.

It will be much easier for you to discover The NEURON Forum for yourself, than for us to try to explain it. Be sure to read the material in Goals and Policies first. For questions about the mechanics of using the Forum, click on the FAQ link near the top of its home page.

We are interested in your suggestions for improving The NEURON Forum, but ask that you post them to Suggestions and Feedback on the Forum itself.

"What's happening to the old NEURON Users' Group mailing list?"

The NEURON Users Group itself will persist. However, the old mailing list is being phased out. Questions emailed to it are being referred to the Forum, and current subscribers to the mailing list are being encouraged to switch to the Forum.

"What if I have a question that is off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush?"

You've been watching "LA Confidential" too much. If you really do have a private question, you can always contact Michael Hines or Ted Carnevale by direct email. However, we'd like to suggest that non-sensitive items be posted to the Forum.

"Do I have to sign up for this Forum thing?"

No. Anyone can read any item in The NEURON Forum. Also, for the time being, we will continue to relay the occasional critically important notice to both the old mailing list and to Forum registrants. However, we expect that most subscribers to the old mailing list will want to switch to the Forum. As a registered Forum user, you can add your own comments, start a new discussion thread, and subscribe to an existing discussion thread so that you'll receive an email notice when there is a new posting.

"I hate change. Why did you do this?"

Until May 2005, we relied on an old-fashioned "mailing list" to send notices to the community of NEURON users, but that had several shortcomings, including lability and nonselectivity.

Information sent to a mailing list is labile because a mailing list has no "memory." Each current subscriber has to keep track of every message that arrives, or it is lost forever. New subscribers have no way to benefit from prior communications.

A mailing list is nonselective because it is an all or none medium--anything the administrators send to the mailing list goes to all users, whether they want it or not. Thus, every time a question came in to the NEURON Users' Group, we had to decide whether to answer just the person who sent it, or whether it was of sufficiently wide interest that it should be relayed to the whole Users' Group. Sensitive to the thin line that distinguishes information from spam, we often refrained from relaying interesting and useful items to the entire Users' Group.

The NEURON Forum has neither of these drawbacks. It has a "memory" because its discussion threads are persistent and are searchable by anyone. And it is completely selective, since discussion threads are inherently an "opt-in" form of communication: anyone can initiate, read, participate in, or receive notifications about any discussion thread that is of interest. Furthermore, the Forum has a "mass mailing" feature that allows us to send the occasional critical notice to all registered users.

In the few months since we launched The NEURON Forum, its membership and content have grown rapidly. As of 12/9/2005 it has 185 registered users, and it contains more than 600 messages from individuals with a wide range of interests and levels of expertise.