So that this does not happen i am planning to put

up a separate website exactly like the bombay LUG. I want some guidance over how to go with it and if the running codes are available as opensource so that we can implement the same.

I am not a maintainer of the website, but I would like to answer anyway ...

There are two separate parts involved ... a website, and a mailing list. In either case, there are quite a few projects to choose from. Your choice will be determined by what software runs on the server, and how much powers you have in adminstering the server.

For the mailing list, the most convenient software to use is mailman, which is available at http://www.list.org/ Its a Python based project, that manages multiple mailing lists on a single site. AFAIK, it works very well with sendmail as well as qmail, and in fact any mailserver that provides a sendmail-type wrapper. The version that you choose to run will depend on which version of Python is installed on your server.

For the website, ILUG-Bom uses Zope, again a Python based project. It's an application server, that allows you to maintain your complete website through a webinterface. Its a very very powerful thing that can be used in place of Apache, or along with it. But nowadays, the trend is towards wiki-style content management systems. The best of them all is TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/) - but I have feeling its too powerful for maintaining a simple website ... it might turn out to be a case of using a destroyer when a small fishing boat could have done. Other good wiki's are PhpWiki (http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/), used by projects like Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net) or Twiki (http://www.twiki.org/) used by freedesktop (http://www.freedesktop.org/) and MoinMoin (http://moin.sourceforge.net/) used by DocBook (http://www.docbook.org/wiki/moin.cgi/)

Of these, I myself have used mailman and PhpWiki ... the first is pretty standard, the only dependency being the correct version of Python. The second, PhpWiki is very very simple to use, but lacks a few features like uploading of files, true control over powers of multiple users etc. I use it to simply maintain my reading notes on my website. The other one I have seen is MoinMoin, which also suffers from user control, but otherwise has very good features.

HTH, Sameer.