It is important to realise that a family mode in a product, is not a substitute for adaquate parental supervision. If a child wants to bypass the family mode in Callisto, it is easily done, they don't use Callisto, they use another newsreader!

However within the confines of Callisto, the family mode will filter about 99% of adult content.

Callisto filters at three levels.

Newsgroups<

newgroups are filtered according to our censoring dictionary. This scores words with the following values:

If a newsgroup scores 4 or more it is barred. We include "alt" as a word to contribute towards the more unregulated nature of the alt hierarchy.

Subjects

Subject titles are treated in the same manner a newsgroups.

Subject Bodies

Subject bodies are scored according to the censorship dictionary, but due the length of article bodies it is not simply a matter of "4 strikes and out" , but an algorithm taking into account the length of text.

Customisation

The user can edit/add/remove and set the levels of all words in the censorship dictionary.

Conclusion

Callisto can view private forums, such as those for Bulletin Board Moderators etc.

Callisto uses the cookie database from Internet Explorer, hence if you have logged into a board once with internet explorer, then using Callisto will leave you logged in and able to access the same forums as if you were using internet explorer.

Callisto was designed around the use of multiple USENET newsservers and around trying to find accessible public servers as part of its normal processing of USENET articles.

You do not need to configure Callisto to locate public servers, it should simply find them as it goes.

The benefits of a multiple server approach are varied:

• News Servers are often too busy to accept more connections.
• Not all posts are on all servers, you see far more comprehensive results using several servers.
• You can download faster by using several servers simultaneously.

Callisto will post large posts uuencode/yyenc format, dividing the posts into multiple parts if they are large in size.

When reading USENET newsgroups, multiple part posts will be automatically grouped and dealt with as one.

By default incomplete multiple part posts are hidden, this can be changed in the Callisto forum filter. 

We do not publish a list of supported Bulletin Boards.

This is due to the myriad versions of these boards and the different ways in which they can be configured and hacked on servers. It really would be futile to claim we support say phpbb2 when we know full well that there may be phpbb2 boards that will not actually work.

What we do have is well over 150 rules/definitions that are used to try and understand and parse BBS style and list style forums.

Last time we did a full scale search for new forums, we were achieving a well over 90% success rate for forums working right out of the box. Those that did not work had new rules added to the rules database creating an overall success rate of about 98%.

If you find a forum that does not work we will add a new rule to the rules database.

The Callisto news reader/Bulletin Board supports all commonly used binary formats used in usenet news groups. Including the relatively new and most efficient format yyenc.

Callisto will automatically group together articles that have been posted as multiple parts, so that they can be decoded and view or saved with a single click.

Callisto can display all common graphical formats internally, other media formats will be played externally according to your default for the media type.