I get this when I issue the 'n' command in a telnet session, note the glitch after politics: Ok: n No new items in yapp No new items in sports No new items in apps No new items in lovelinks No new items in fitness No new items in music No new items in dpo No new items in cultures No new items in media No new items in web No new items in newtest No new items in internet No new items in tv No new items in movies No new items in politics Invalid participation file format. No new items in food No new items in books No new items in politics No new items in environment No more conferences left.

jdaniel still can't access the web because the webuser command won't work anymore. Is there any way a user can change their own password on the web. By the way, Josh says our interface is superior to the WELLs in some ways. Now, if we just had another 10,000 users...

I still can't seem to get cfcreate to work from inside or outside of yapp. I've tried it logged in as su, as cfadm, as terry, I've tried it at an ok prompt and at the unix shell.

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > jdaniel still can't access the web because the webuser command won't work > anymore. Is there any way a user can change their own password on the web. Yes, a user can change their web password (but not their Unix password, if any) from the user preferences page. There's a link to it from the main menu. > By the way, Josh says our interface is superior to the WELLs in some ways. Glad to hear that. Maybe he can enumerate a couple of those ways and we could list them somewhere. -Dave

I'm entering this on NetRabbit. I am trying out the cfdelete command and it doesn't seem to work for conferences that have some content in them: Ok: cfdelete tv Removing members' participation files... Removing conflist entries... Removing desclist entry... Removing directory... Reloading conflist... Ok: cfdelete movies Conference is not empty. Ok: cfdelete music Conference is not empty. Ok: As you can see, tv was deleted because it had no items yet, but movies and music couldn't be deleted because they had some items.

I'll wait till you synch up the code till I try this again! % /usr/bbs/bin/bbs login cfadm -- invoking bbs -n Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid command: log Invalid checksum There are already 0 copies being used. Try again later. Couldn't get license for conf.netrabbit.net

www# webuser jdaniel This program must be installed setuid root www#

Terry and Dave, Things are going okay with the new P&P (Austen) conference. I am able to enter new topics. We have about 26 users already since Terry set up the conference late last night. I still need to explore around the back hallways here and see where I have to go and what I have to do to telnet in changes to the main page and put up my links and maybe a modified FAQ from the old site. So the host things will come, I am sure. This place seems to be pretty easily navigable, my comjpliments, Terry. There are some user troubles. Three reported not being able to get in. All different combinations of browsers and platforms. The authenication is cookie-based, right? Is there a standard setting that must be enabled or disabled for the password screen to work? Thanks. I will try not to bug you too much. Amy

Amy, can you be more specific about "not being able to get in"? Were they prompted for a login and password, which was then rejected?

Hello, Dave. Thanks for asking. Instead of repeating their words, I will direct you to the HELP! topic in the Austen (not Austin) conference. There the users themselves tell what happened. Amy

Does Yapp have an archive function? I have yet to get into the guts here.

I cannot seem to create a new topic in this conference so I suppose I will continue to post to this one, as I am beginning to feel it is quite my own. (Sorry I often slip into modified early 19th century British dialect) When is a bug a bug? And when is it a "would be nice" feature? And then again, "would be nice" features are debatable according to opinion and need. This said, I have found it is possible to create a new topic without naming it. Should there be an error message for this? Trying to new extra polite while new, Amy

One thing I notice, Amy, is that you're cont putting anything into the text box for the introctory text in new items you are creating.

] One thing I notice, Amy, is that you're cont putting anything into the text box for the introctory text in new items you are creating. __________ Right. I didn't get that at first. Here's another suggestion for groups with heavy traffic -- an option offering a choice somewhere in between looking at only brand new messages and looking at 7-day-old messages.

We have that 'recent' button does that.

Recent button? I don't see it anywhere. How many days?

Well it's actually the last seven days button. You can also specify a *range of responses to look at in the box with number 0 in it. You could put 9-17 for example.

Terry, you said: We have that 'recent' button does that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I found my ideal range of messages: http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/restricted/browse/austen/all/since/-.5 Perfect for me personally anyway, so I can see new posts and probably those they are referring to.

http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/restricted/browse/austen/all/since/-.5 _______________ Don't laugh. I have since learned that a decimel rounds up to a whole integer. A day's worth is good, too. With our kind of traffic. Is it possible for us to have a "tdoay's posts" button even if it is not necesary for the other conferences. I noticed in a previous post that it is possible to change the background file by setting a default wallpaper, then overriding it for a single conference. How much of this sort of customizing can occur. Or is the new freeloader asking for too much? Amy

How willing are you to learn how to administer a conference and make changes. We'll be glad to assist you in making changes. I would suggest you get a copy of the administrator's manual. I'll drop a copy in an email to you. Can you read postscript?

Terry I was going to call you today to talk about some things, but here is a good opportunity to report something we were talking about in the Drawing Room last night. Joan has had a lot of experience as a participant in discussion lists and is very fearful that the inability to respond to individual messages may stifle the spontaneous flow of conversation we had with the branching board. I should not put it all on Joan. Lots of us miss the ability to see the structure of the responses, to change subjects in midstream and enjoy some of the other features of the wild and wooly outline style. I am so grateful to you for being so accomodating and giving us what seems to be such reliable server space that I tend to be determined to make this system work. Indeed if it has worked so well in other venues, I must believe that a) we can accomodate to the format, or b) that the format can be adapted to us. Plus, I don't want to acknowledge that format can play a life or death role in the whole feel of a community. So many other variables are in play: our common interests, affection for each other, need to convene. What has been your experience with each format and what is your opinion about the intuitiveness and naturalness of each? Amy

] How willing are you to learn how to administer a conference and make changes. __________ Most willing.

My experience with the "outline" model is that it is much harder to keep everything in context when reading responses, and so it isn't as "natural" as the linear thread model, which closely parallels real life conversation. Yapp does allow responses to specific responses, but the new response is added to the end of the linear thread, with a reference back to the original response. Thus, it looks like you're changing the subject of discussion back to a previous point, which also parallels real life conversation.

] Yapp does allow responses to specific responses, but the new response is added to the end of the linear thread, with a reference back to the original response. ___________ This may be all we need to satisfy everyone. Where can I see this feature in action? I would like to invite my fellow P&P addict, Joan, to come here and describe her experience with a forum moving from the branching format to Caucus. I trust her opinion about many things but would like your help in getting to the bottom of the "why" behind her belief that the sense of community was weakened by the format change. Maybe we will discover there were other factors that broke down the magic. Or we could learn something about the format that will help everybody. Also, by "natural," what I think I mean is not that it is most like real verbal conversation (highly overrated anyway), but that the branching model gives a user the ability to interrupt, not go around in a circle as at a business meeting waiting for everybody to have her say. It's great for us impulsive types. Let me think about this some more. Amy

Would it be too awfully hard to put HTML error correction in the create topic function? Or is it there and just doesn't check for two //s after htttp:

] Yapp does allow responses to specific responses, but the new response is added to the end of the linear thread, with a reference back to the original response. So how is this achieved within the software? Can the new response somehow be linked directly back to its referant so that the reader can arrive there via a click or somesuch? Or does the author have to remember the message number and manually enter it, with the person interested in going back having to type the number manually into that little box at the bottom of the topic? Joan

I am finding this conference very difficult to navigate. I just added a post, but after everything cycled around and came to a stop, the las posting visible is not mine, but is "125 of 125" Mine should have been 126. How do I see whether my new response has arrived properly? In a different item here, I thought that it had not got posted so tried submitting again - but after that submission cycled around again, the first one now displayed, but not the one that I had just added. (the first lines were d fferent or I would never have noticed!) I am assuming that when I "submit" this one, my previous one will probably appear, but as I type at this moment I "know not whether it arrived in safety." I am a rotten typist, and I have often had it happen that something that I post will be truncated when it appears. Is there some mysterious invisible thing that I might be typing that causes this to happen? My text looks perfectly OK in the text entry window, but when it posts some portion of it is not there. If I re-post from the same "typing" the same thing happens. If I delete the word before and after the truncation point and type them again, it goes through properly. What invisible thing could be making this happen? (It has happened to others on occasion, but rarely, since almost anyone types better than I do!) Joan (Austen Conf.)

I tried typing "127" into the box at the bottom of this topic to see if my text all arrived OK, but got the following message: Response #127 is too big (last 126) Over in Austen, when a post is added, it is displayed right after being added. This does not happen here? Pardon all of these questions, but this is confusing the

Amy, create topic does HTML syntax checking (but not error correction) but doesn't currently check for // after http:, but it probably wouldn't be hard to add. Thanks for the suggestion. Joan, entering responses to specific responses is currently only possible from the text-based interface, but it's not that hard to configure the web interface to allow it as well. I'll add it to the list of things to include in the next release (probably sometime in December). In response to your next message, this conference is linked to a mailing list and so the message doesn't actually appear until it makes it out to the mailing list, which may take a moment or two.

responses to specific responses is currently only possible from the text-based interface, but it's not that hard to configure the web interface to allow it as well. I'll add it to the list of things to include in the next release (probably sometime in December). ____________ Excellent! How will you do that? With a=name tags or what?

Well, I have now been away for close to a half hour, and no posting has yet appeared...

Now I am completely confused - that posting to which I referred never did appear at all! (And I no longer remember the content.) :-(

] In response to your next message, this conference is linked to a ] mailing list and so the message doesn't actually appear until it makes ] it out to the mailing list, which may take a moment or two. But I waited for over 5 minutes the other day - and nothing happened until I posted annother message - and then the first one finally appeared. So I tried it again this evening in a response similar to this - and waited a half hour, and it didn't show up. But this time when I posted a follow up it DIDN'T appear - somehow it never seemed to get posted at all. So I am still puzzled. How long should one have to wait in this conference to see whether one's mesage has arrived OK? Over in the Austen conference, it appears of its own accord; here it appears that it will not, even if it has been successfully submitted.

I think I may have figured out why my earlier posting did not successfully submit - it has happened before over in Austen. I believe that in that earlier posting, when I clicked the submit button, I received an html warning message that I had one of those pointy brackets outside of an html tag. It offered me the option to fid it and re-post. So I did - but it did NOT resubmit. I believe that the resubmit button is not functioning correctly. This also seems to be true of any action that offers an oppo tunity to re-do something. While reading topics in "new" mode, I tried to get an image that did not display to re-load (just the image, not the topic), but after the image failed to re-load, I was jumped to the text entry window and all of the other responses in the topic which I had not yet seen were gone. I had to re-load the entire topic in order to get back to them. And while I'm thinking about it, Terry said that he thought that there was a way to get around whatever it is that forces a paragarph break in text after some number of characters is reached. Operationally, if a paragraph gets to be longer than 5 or 6 lines in the text entry window, when it gets submitted, there will be a new paragraph involuntarily begun, often in the beginning of a word. And if it is in the beginning of a word, it dropps a letter out of the word. If it happens to be in the middle of n html line, it messes up the html. Joan

(As I expected, the previous post demonstrates what I was speaking of.)

One more thought, Dave, while you are tinkering - when viewing the topic list in "new" mode, the listing: Topic Resps Subject 33 27 incredibly dumb and stupid questions (for newbies) (terry) in the topic column only the topics with "new" postings are displayed; is there any way that in the "resps" column, instead of showing the total number of responses, it could show the total number of NEW responses? That would be very helpful! Joan

Hi Dave, I will be assisting in the Austen conference administration and was hoping you could point me to an address to ftp the administrator's manual. Thanks in advance. Myretta

The yapp administrators guide can be found at: ftp://armidale.ann-arbor.mi.us/pub/yapp/admin_guide.ps.gz Kaylene

You'll need a postscript program to read it such as Adobe Acrobat. See the apps conference here for directions on geting Adobe Acrobat.

Or get it directly from this address: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/win/3.x/ar32e30.exe

Dave, I have begun dabbling with the "bbs" (text) version of yapp, and find myself running up against some really basic problems, and although I have read many many help files and have found out stuff that I never knew I might want to know, I was unable to find out how to read a specific response to a specific topic. The smallest unit I can display is an entire topic. How does one display, for example, only response 1 of topic 1 in this conference? Or a range of responses? Is there some way (other than in Unix) to make just one screen at a time display? (For example, in Caucus you can do ss23 [set screensize nn] and cause only one screen at a time to be displayed.) And is there a way to stop an endlessly scrolling stream of topics that I do not want to receive if I accidentally get one started? I had no luck with ^c or ^x, and ^z did stop it, but it also dumped me right out of bbs and back to the shell prompt. There must be a better way than that? Even when I got to the end of a topic and it paused for the "reply, pass" options I could not get it to stop - it went right on with the next (unwanted) topic. Joan

Hi again. Can you please tell me what format the admin guide is actually in. I recognize that it's a postscript file, but it seems to be in a compressed format. However neither my Sun nor my RS6000 recognize it. May I please have some advice. Thanks. Myretta

Myretta - having found the URL here, I looked again, and it is compressed in an unfamilliar (to me) format GZP. However, when I DLed it at home, I bravely tossed it to my (Mac version of) StuffIt Expander, and it decanted - er - decompressed it with no problem. Not sure how this will help you on a Unix machine, but maybe it will?

I tried Acro read as Tery suggested. No luck on windows either. I am glad I got the new 3.0 Acrobat, though, much nicere than the old 2=year-old 2.0, but as I suspected no post script conversion for this sort of doc, unless I need to rename the file to get it to work? Amy

I just realized the file is gz which is a unix compression format. If you're a shell user, ftp it to your shell area then type 'gunzip ' or, better yet. let's make a project for our unix dreamteam: make this available as an html file on a website!

Joan, you can display only response 1 of topic 1 in this conference by doing: "r 1 noresp" and then at the "Respond or pass?" prompt, do "only 1" or, for a range of responses, you could do: "1-5" (The same ranges should work from the web as well if you enter them in the "Redisplay from response number:" box) To display one screen at a time, you need to use a "pager" like more or less. For example, do "def pager more". An administrator should probably make this the global default.

Thanks to all. If you don't have gunzip on your UNIX system (I know I don't), I'll post an address tomorrow where you can get it.

OK, here is what is becoming a very frequently asked question over in the chat room: "Can anyone tell me how to avoid the topic disappearing from the menu at spring when you have just visited it." This really is an annoying and frustrating experience, especially for the new folks: "Dont worry - I'm still finding it hard to use, and I'm only getting to about 5 threads. [topics] The others go unread, which is a pity." What are the chances of getting the main "menu" of a conference to always display all of the topics in the listing, but use the color coding to show which topics have new postings? This would solve several problems: - not knowing where the heck the topic went after you read it when you are new - not being able to go back to a topic that you have already viewed without first going back out to the menu and changing the whole listing to "all" (and not all new folks even realize that this is possible at first) - not being able to know how many total responses are in a not-visible item in order to change the URL line in the browser to go right to the end of a long topic that has no new postings. - not being able to simply and easily go directly to a topic that has no new postings to put it into the menu in order to add a posting. (This was my own experience with this very posting! I wanted to add this message, but Topic 1 did not appear in the menu. I tried to fix up the URL line in my browser to go directly to it, but did not remember the syntax for displaying just today's messages correctly and ended up having to wait for all 149 postings to display just to get a text entry window. I must confess that quite often when presented with a situation like this, I find myself deciding to just forget about it and say nothing. And others say that they are doing the same. This is not conducive to free flow of conversation, but I think that the way of displaying the list of items when entering a topic suggested above would help to make it easier for people to navigate and converse more comfortably right from their first visit.

Any clues as to how I can get this to work: www# /usr/local/bin/webuser nike This program must be installed setuid root

Or this: Ok: li porch 2 Sorry, you can't do that! Ok: help link **** LINKFROM **** Syntax: li_nkfrom Description: This will link items in the specified range in the given conference into the current conference. This can only be done by a fair-witness of the current conference. A link can be erased with the kill command. Link commands are logged to the conference log file. See also: kill, file log Ok: linkfrom porch 2 Sorry, you can't do that! I was trying to link from the austen conference to topic 2 in the porch conference. I've been getting this message a lot. And I'm a fairwitness in both conferences. I created both conferences. This is wierd, because I was able to link a couple of conference topics from austen to books and to movies just yesterday.

Is there any fix for this error: 66 1 Darcy's "nearest relations" Got error 2 (No such file or directory) in opening /usr/bbs/confs/austen/_67 Got error 2 (No such file or directory) in opening /usr/bbs/confs/austen/_68 Got error 2 (No such file or directory) in opening /usr/bbs/confs/austen/_69 I got this doing the browse command.

As a temporary fix, I copied topic _66 to _67, _68, _69, and _70 But that's a kludge at best.

If we use makewebuser while in text-yapp to get into browser mode, how do we get back out of it to return to text mode again? (OK - I'm happy to report that just changing the word "vi" to "pico" in my .profile file seems to have changed my default editor to pico - when I invoked the editor here with ":e" I did not fall into the black hole of vi. I did not need to ad anything to the path because the necessary path was already specified in the default path.)

Use makewebuser from a shell prompt or use the bang (!).

Terry, I killed 67-69 Sorry for the confusion. They were dupe topics.

Thanks. I'll be back on line in 8 hours or so. I'm glad you're online!

> www# /usr/local/bin/webuser nike > This program must be installed setuid root chown root /usr/local/bin/webuser chmod 4755 /usr/local/bin/webuser

HELP!!! HELP!!! How come every time I choose topic 39 I keep getting the entire contents ot topic 1???

I'd like to see the list of topics show the following on the web: no. topic date of last response no of new responses total responses

I have specified the access_log file with TranferLog directive in the httpd.conf file. and the access_log is in /usr/local/etc/httpd/logs How do you restart it? I'd really like to get logging going again.

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > I have specified the access_log file with TranferLog directive in the > httpd.conf file. How do you restart it? You need to kill -HUP the httpd.