FAQs & Answers

General

1. What is this site for?
   • This Web site represents DVOI.COM, an experimental Internet services provider (ISP) for musicians. Our users include singers, performers, artists, homemakers, researchers, and retiring business executives. The terms of use and acceptable use policies (AUPs) are being formulated. If interested, please contact moc.iovd@secivres-resu.
2. What does "DVOI" stand for?
   • It's just another Internet domain name and doesn't mean anything, maybe a nonword word or an anagram. However, we like to pronounce it as /díːvɔi/ (dee-voy). If you speak Japanese, say "どぼい" (dough-boy) with an equal stress on each syllable. Here's another version of the audio. Anyway, the name is short enough for daily use and does help you save keystrokes.
     • Some might argue that "dvoi" can constitute an offensive phrase in some natural language. Any similarity or resemblance to such words or phrases is entirely coincidental.

Managing Your Account

Mailing

1. How can I get a DVOI.COM account?
   • Write us at moc.iovd@troppus. For e-mail, forwarding-only accounts are also available, as well as mailing list accounts. Please note that all DVOI.COM e-mail accounts heavily use SPAM/UCE/junk filters, virus scanners, realtime blackhole lists (RBLs), and other known-to-be-effective sanitizers.
2. There seems to be a delay before e-mail reaches my mailbox. Why?
   • DVOI.COM assumes that all remote SMTP hosts are running RFC-compliant MTAs. Such hosts should have no problem sending e-mail to DVOI.COM. See also http://www.greylisting.org/.
3. I asked a friend of mine to send e-mail to my DVOI.COM account but was told her mail got bounced with an error message saying something about refused connection.
   • Please make sure that her SMTP host isn't listed on well-maintained publicly accessible RBLs. For further information, check the URI mentioned in the error message or refer to related resources on the net, e.g., http://spam.abuse.net/.
4. How do I change my mail forwarding address?
   1. Use: https://z.dvoi.com/bin/rm for a DVOI.COM address; https://z.dvoi.com/m/f for 34SKIDOO.COM.
   1. Use: https://z.dvoi.com/repo/.
   2. Open the Config folder under the My Files repository heading.
   3. Edit the mail.fwd.txt file, change the e-mail address, then save the file.
      • You can right-click on the icon to edit the file while online. (Right-cliking may or may not work, depending on your particular web browser setup. If it doesn't, use the toolbar.)
5. I forgot my password.
   • Please use the password manager at https://z.dvoi.com/bin/lp. You can always request a replacement password and change it. DVOI.COM uses one-way encryption, by the way, for enhanced login password security (i.e., a lost password can't be recovered).
6. DVOI.COM seems to have problems with SSL connections.
   • DVOI.COM may use a self-signed SSL certificate to enable SSL/TLS in areas where encrypted data exchange is preferred, e.g., the Password Manager form. Your browser software may tell you that DVOI.COM is not a trustworthy entity, but you can safely go ahead because HTTP sessions are always encrypted wherever SSL/TLS is used.

Using Mailing Lists

1. How do I start my own mailing list?
   • Write us at moc.iovd@secivres-resu or, if you have an admin password, visit the messaging services page.
2. I posted a message that I nicely formatted in HTML, but the formatting seems to have gone. Why?
   • By default the DVOI.COM mailing list server tries to convert HTML messages into plain text. It usually works. It also tries to remove e-mail "attachments" in proprietary format. See also http://expita.com/nomime.html and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html.

Using the User Web Spaces

1. How do I upload my files?
   • Use WebDAV (preferred) or CVS over SSH (if you insist and insist).
     Log onto https://z.dvoi.com/ox and put mark your file(s) in the Public folder under My Files as shared.
2. My pages don't work.
   • If you opted to use XML or XHTML, your source file must at least be a "well-formed" XML document. Also make sure that your XSLT file(s) is working.
3. Is there any RDBMS backend available?
   • Yes. But what would you want to use it for? Unless you have a copious amount of data, XML might be a far better choice.
4. Isn't PHP supported?
   • No. One of our design goals is to separate data, logic, and presentation to a reasonable extent. Embedded scripting, especially when combined with bad programming, can easily lead to a situation where presentation of data ends up incorporating the logic to manipulate that data, although we believe it's all up to the programmer or the designer.
     • Note: If you insist, you can use a powerful Perl-based Web site development/delivery engine using HTML::Mason, a. k. a. Mason. Another option is a web application framework know as "Ruby on Rails" which employs the MVC architecture pattern.
5. How do I create multilingual pages?
   • One solution is to go Unicode. Many modern Web browsers support UTF-8. However, there are lots of small-screen devices out there that do not support multiple character encoding schemes. Also, there are people still using legacy Web browser software.