Welcome to John Swartz's BOCFAQ. It was too valuable an endeavour to let it's online accessability disappear when it became unavailable early in 2009, so I thought it'd be useful to incorporate it here.

The only changes I've made are in layout and formatting in order to make it "fit in" with the rest of the site - plus I've had to split it into separate pages due to it's sheer size.

I've also stripped out any links which have died since the FAQ was produced but if you notice any which have subsequently become unavailable, and I'll remove them.

Please note: this is an archive document whose last revision was in 2001 - as far as I know, John isn't planning to update it in the future, so please read it in that context and bear in mind that some of the information is now obviously going to be outdated.

November 2013: Jared St Germain has produced a version of the FAQ for the Gopher protocol. The proxy site is available from this link, but you can visit the native version with a text browser like Lynx or by using the Firefox add-on, "Overbite".

NB: If you didn't know gophers even had protocols, then it's probably not going to be relevant to you, and so you'll probably be better off using the "http" version...