text: The WELL's conferencing system is organized into forums reflecting member interests, and include arts, health, business, regions, hobbies, spirituality, music, politics, games, software and many more. These community forums, known as conferences, are supervised by conference hosts who guide conversations and may enforce conference rules on civility and/or appropriateness. Initially all hosts were selected by staff members.  In 1995, Gail Ann Williams changed the policies to enable user-created forums. Participants can create their own independent personal conferences—either viewable by any WELL member or privately viewable by those members on a restricted membership list—on any subject they please with any rules they like. Public conferences are open to all members, while private conferences are restricted to a list of users controlled by the conference hosts. Some "featured private" or "private independent" conferences (such as "Women on the WELL" and "Recovery") are listed in the WELL's directory and members may request admission to such conferences. Within the conferences, logged-in members can see the real name of the author of each post. The intent is to foster a more intimate community through "people taking responsibility for opinions, obsessions, insights, silliness, and an occasional faux pas."
  Women form a large percentage of the WELL's user community, and play strong leadership roles.  "[A]lthough women made up only 10 percent of people going online, they constituted 40 percent of the population on the WELL."
  Initially, in 1985, the WELL was a dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) influenced by EIES. Access to the WELL was via computer modem and phone line, then, when the internet opened to commercial traffic in the 1990s, the WELL became one of the original dial-up gateway ISPs to provide access to it. Over time, web technology evolved and support for dial-up access was dropped. Today users access the WELL via SSH or the web.