Testing from www.spring.com

testing email gateway 2

OK, I created a conference called software and I can't create topics in it now. You're saying it's becvause  I set it up with mailing list enabling. Now, how do I fix software so I can go in and create new items?

How can we get fre fre  grex or a better text editor on here. Alsok the back sapce key doesn't work. Nor does control-h.

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > > How can we get grex or a better text editor on here. > Alsok the back sapce key doesn't work. Nor does control-h. I've installed gate on www.spring.com as the default Yapp editor, and it does line wrap. Your erase key is probably set to the Delete key. This is orthogonal to Yapp and whatever editor is in use. You can set it to backspace if it isn't already by "stty erase " in Unix, or prefix it with a ! from inside Yapp. You can see your current terminal settings with "stty all" or "stty -a" depending on what flavor of Unix you're using. (I presume you know most if not all of this, Paul, others reading this may not.)

Can we have our headers to each response look like this? Topic 1176 [media]: '60 Minutes' Recruits Ivins, O'Rourke #101 of 101: plain brown rapper (jonl) Fri Jun 21 '96 (11:04) 2 lines .

Yes, you can define "rsep" to look like anything you want. Do "help itemsep" for some of the codes. "help miscsep" and "help variables" are also relevant. You probably want something like: def rsep "\nTopic %i: '%h'\n#%r of %n: %a (%l) %d %s lines"

The biggest single impediment to gettingthis thing built right now is the editor in yapp. I need to be able to type :e to bring up the pico editor in order to get much done. AS it stands, the conference build is going extremely slow.

You can tell Yapp to always bring up pico immediately by putting: def editor pico set edalways in your .cfonce file.

OK that worked. I didn't have a .cfonce file so I created one? Should we set this up so this is creaed automatially when a new user signs up?

If you want to have everyone use pico, sure. This can be part of the Unix newuser process.

Let's do that then. Wow, you got back to me in about a minute. You must be online somwhere. How do you invoke the pico editor from the default editor? That might be a better thing to set up, just to make it easy for folks to get to pico from the default editor by typing :e

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > Let's do that then. Wow, you got back to me in about a minute. YOu must > be online somwhere. HOw do you invoke the pico editor from the default > editor? That might be a better thing to set up, just to make it easy for > folks to get to pico from the default editor by typing :e I'm not sure I understand the question. You invoke the visual editor from the default editor by doing :e. If the question is, how do you tell Yapp that pico is the default visual editor for everyone, then the answer is to put: define editor pico in the /usr/bbs/rc file.

The server on the web won't come up right now. There seems to be a general failure. Can't reach you at your home or office by phone. Hope this gets to you soon.

It seems to be working fine at the moment. Is there any URL in particular that doesn't seem to work for you now? The httpd error_log over the last couple days reports a number of "user ... not found" errors on yapp URLs, but no other errors. The user names not found are indeed not listed in /usr/bbs/etc/.htpasswd, so there's nothing suspicious there. Yapp's errorlog (/usr/bbs/errorlog) has a number of recent entries reporting files not found starting at about 6pm monday, all from your account trying to access items in the software conference. Since the software conference log (/usr/bbs/confs/software/log) reports that you killed all the items, this isn't surprising. I am curious to know if this was intentional, however. So, to sum up, I can't find anything wrong at the moment.

Killed all the items? I hope not, it was a lot of work creating them.

I was shocked to see the whole software conference wiped out. What happened? It was working fine last time I looked. Is there any way to recover this?

Only if you backed up the filesystem since then. The conference log says that you were freezing, retiring, and killing items in the conference. (Did you know you were doing any of this?) Look at the /usr/bbs/confs/software/log file... It's hard to delete items unless you really mean to.

I never deleted a single item. There's some kind of glitch here. All I did was go through a read items. We haven't done a backup. Looks like back to the drawing board. I would like to understand what happened though so it won't happen again. I had other plans for this weekend like sailing, oh well.

So I guess one question is: were you really online from austin.spring.com all the time from 10:50pm Monday until 10:50am Tuesday? If yes, then the question becomes, how could you have frozen, forgotten, retired, and killed every item over a 12 hour period without noticing. If no, then maybe something intentionally malicious happened at austin.spring.com. The URL access times are regular enough that it could have been the result of a script.

Austin.spring.com is a Windows 95 machine so no one can log in to it remotely. All I did wzs set up 162 items and then go through and read them over a short period of time. I didn't freeze, retire, kill or do anything except add to every item. The Virtual Places was topic was developing really well with over 20 responses. Some of them very eloquent and considered. I gave out the url's to Forrest Stroud and to Julie and told them to incorporate them in their websites. Now, it's back to the drawing board with a new conference called 'apps' and I plan to delete the software conference when I figure out how. I don't want to start a conference with item 163. Something happened, I hope it doesn't happen again. I can't get you by phone anymore. Maybe you're out of town or on vacation. I wonder if it's something to do with the telnet/web link? Is this possible. What could have caused this?

The only thing I did with the topics in this conference was to read through via a telnet session using the same commands I use to navigate on the WELL. I hit r to read a topic and n to go to the next topic. I don't use any other commands than these. Could it be that hitting 'r' or 'n' in a telnet session is causing topics to be deleted?

Yes, I was out of town from Monday afternoon until late Tuesday afternoon. Thursday's I am at another of my offices at Merit Network (an ISP), so the best way to reach me is by email to thalerd@eecs.umich.edu. You delete a conference either with the "cfdelete" command inside Yapp, or else via the web from the "List all conferences" page. No, it isn't possible that you could have deleted anything from a telnet session, since the logs clearly show that it was done by accessing the URLs for forgetting, freezing, retiring and killing, from the web from austin.spring.com over a 12-hour period. (See the email I sent you.)

There's got to be some kind of glitch, because I'm the only one that uses this machine. austin.spring.com is a Windows 95 machine. It's just as well, because I can build a better version of the conference. I'm just curious as to why this happened and I can't buy a hacker theory. I just doesn't seem likely.

Well I can't understand how it could have anything to do with Yapp itself, since Yapp doesn't make you access URLs. I'm curious as well what could have made your browser request URLs without you knowing about it.

After glancing at the httpd access_log some more, it looks like the URLs were accessed very methodically and in the same order the links appear on the pages, and every link was followed. Every item was frozen, forgotten, retired, and killed in order, and the buttons for these occur immediately after each other in that order. Also, every response was censored and then scribbled. This basically means that your browser was somehow walking all the links itself. What browser were you using? Does it have some sort of feature that allows it to go exploring by itself? This looks like what was happening, and is a very bad thing for a browser to do when in Yapp... -Dave

Please add line feeds to this message box. I go off the page, and I go off line real fast! Also, why do I have a 30-minute limit to post a reply? Why can't I take my time and reply the next day, or whenever?

I agree, we need to fix these text entry boxes to the text wraps. There shouldn't be a need for a message above the box that says: You have up to half an hour to submit a response from: Sat Jul 13 20:15:02 1996 Don't forget to hit ENTER (or RETURN) at the end of each line. On the WELL, the text wraps.

You don't have to respond within half an hour. The message is obsolete.

How do we implement line wrap?

Item 12 in apps has no title because I didn't fill that in on the web page Is there a way to go back and add a title?

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > How do we implement line wrap? You just need to remove the 2 tags from the item header format, and add to the end of each of the first three response header format lines if you want the Response/Date/From lines to stay on separate lines. You can make these changes from the sysconfig page (log in as sysop, and go to the "Configure system" page).

As you can see, we're beginning to change the response headers. Is there a guide to 'yapp variables' anywhere. For example, we need to know the variable for athe topic name and we need to list responses as: '3 of 29' etc. so what is the variable for the total number of responses in a given item? Here's what we have now: 1:] Response 31: Tue, Jul 16, 1996 (23:08) | Dave Thaler (thaler@armidale.ann-arbor.mi.us) And we'd like to acheive something more like this: Topic 11 [fitness]: Workouts! How'd it go today? #914 of 917: Dave Thaler (thaler) Tue 16 Jul '96 (10:23)

Yes, "help variables" will show you the variables which you can use in the form %{variable}. Not everything you need is a "variable" though. On the other hand, everything you need is available as a "separator" which you use in the form %X ("help sep", "help itemsep", "help miscsep", and perhaps "help itemcond" and "help misccond" are relevant). For example, a "%h" gives you the topic name, and "%n" gives you the total # of responses. Some variables synonymous with some separators. I'd start by looking at "help itemsep" first, and then look at the other help screens mentioned for anything you can't find there.

What would be the code to make our response headers in the telnet side look like this: Item 740 of 841 [sports]: 1996: Centennial Olympic Games - Atlanta Resp 142 of 143: Never State Expire (josh) * Fri 7/19/96 (23:13) * 4 lines

Or better yet: Top 740 of 841 [sports]: 1996: Centennial Olympic Games - Atlanta Res 142 of 143: Never State Expire (josh) * Fri 7/19/96 (23:13) * 4 lines

Try: Item %i of %{lastitem} [%{confname}]: %h Resp %r of %n: %a (%l) * %d * %s lines With HTML tags, it should be something like: Item %i of %{lastitem} [%{confname}]: %h<BR> Resp %r of %n: %a (<a href="mailto:%e">%l</a>) * %d * %s lines<BR>

Tried that and it looks a little wierd, it has some extra brackets and break tags that I'm not sure why they show up. Take a look at one of our topics and you'll see what I mean.

Instead of the (ampersand)lt; you need to put in a real less than sign. Same for greater than. In the text of my response, I used those escapes so you could see the HTML tags from the web instead of actually doing them.

On the web, we seem to have lost all our paragraph breaks. What setting controls this in the configuration page on the web?

Dave, Kym here. I am trying to add a background to all of the pages. I added a jpg file to the gifs directory and I also put it in the www directory just in case. I am wondering how to reference that, how it must be written out. I have put it in the body tag though it doesn't seem to want to come up. I am wondering if there is a special way to reference gif or graphic files. My email is kym@spring.com

Dave, Kym here. I am trying to add a background to all of the pages. I added a jpg file to the gifs directory and I also put it in the www directory just in case. I am wondering how to reference that, how it must be written out. I have put it in the body tag though it doesn't seem to want to come up. I am wondering if there is a special way to reference gif or graphic files. My email is kym@spring.com

When I look at the source of pages from my browser, I see *2* BODY tags currently: BODY background="halk.jpg" body background="chalk.jpg" I'm not sure which one a browser will use when there's two, but one should be removed. The problem is though, that it can't find the jpg file either way. You need to give it the full pathname to look in, since the yapp gifs directory isn't the default place httpd looks. Since %{gifs} is a macro which expands to the full pathname of the gifs directory, you should change it to: BODY background="%{gifs}chalk.jpg"

In the Apps conference, we want to got back and add icons to the titles in the different topics. Where are these titles stored? Also, along the same lines, one of the titles didn't get entered so we need to go back and add it in later. We'll be needing to modify the introductory text as we go along.

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > In the Apps conference, we want to got back and add icons to the titles > in the different topics. Where are these titles stored? Also, along the > same lines, one of the titles didn't get entered so we need to go back > and add it in later. We'll be needing to modify the introductory text as > we go along. They're stored in the second line of the file containing the item text ("help file item") in the conference's directory. If you edit this, you should delete the "sum" file in the same directory, then go into yapp, join that conference, and do "set sum", which will regenerate the summary file. The sum file is just a cache of information which speeds things up a lot. Yapp doesn't currently allow you to edit item information from within Yapp. When it does (as you've requested), the above procedure is exactly what Yapp will be doing for you.

We're going to be sending folks directly to topics from the Stroud site and if they'e not registered they get an error message if they don't have a login id and a password. Is there any way we can put a 'register' button on this error message? Also, how do we institute word wrap in this text entry box on the web?

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > We're going to be sending folks directly to topics from the Stroud site and > if they're not registered they get an error message if they don't have a > login id and a password. Is there any way we can put a 'register' button > on this error message? If by "an error message" you mean either the prompt for User ID and Password, or an "Authorization Required" error message, then the answer is no, those are browser-specific things that your site has absolutely no control over as far as I know. One alternative would be to make the conference a readonly conference, which means that users can read items without being authenticated. You could then put a register button there (by putting a link in the public_read_header or public_read_footer templates). > Also, how do we institute word wrap in this text entry box on the web? Add the following line to /usr/bbs/www/rc: define txtsep "%(L%(F%7N:%)%X%L<br<%)" Dave

I just noticed there was a typo in the previous message. If you're reading this from a browser, the line to add to /usr/bbs/www/rc is: define txtsep "%(L%(F%7N:%)%X%L<br>%)" (There was a less than which should have been a greater than) Again, the br should be surrounded by less than/greater than, and not ampersand lt; and ampersand gt;

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > Also, how do we institute word wrap in this text entry box on the web? Put WRAP=SOFT as an attribute to the TEXTAREA tag in the enter_get and the read_footer templates.

Does yapp feature an onpager and offpager command. How do you set your scroll rate and screensize?

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > Does yapp feature an onpager and offpager command. No, but that's an interesting idea. What use do you have in mind? > How do you set your scroll rate and screensize? Depends on the platform. In BSD Unix (like BSDI), you can do "stty rows 24" while in System V Unix (like Solaris), you do "setenv LINES 24"

We need a way for users to set their screensize and whether paging is on or off. On the WELL, they use the commands onpager and offpager. You can access this command from just about anywhere, the ok prompt or the respond/pass prompt. This is a pretty basic feature.

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > We need a way for users to set their screensize and whether paging is on > or off. On the WELL, they use the commands onpager and offpager. You > can access this command from just about anywhere, the ok prompt or the > respond/pass prompt. This is a pretty basic feature. Ok, that's different, and it's actually more general than that since you can specify WHICH pager to turn on (more/less/anything else). "onpager" -> "define pager more". "offpager" -> "undefine pager". Again, for screensize use "unix 'stty rows 24'".

Well, I set up wordwrap as you suggested above and now I'm in my first test of this feature and yes! it works. So I deleted the comment above to enter a return at the end of each line and also deleted the obsolete command that says you have one hour to e nter a response. There's no time limit on entering a response anyway. I think wordwrap should be the default that this package comes with. There's a real need for a "fast start" system administrator's guide with yapp.

Yapp WWW Administrator writes: > I think wordwrap should be the default that this package comes with. It will be, starting with release 3.0.10 (which is about a week away now). > There's a real need for a "fast start" system administrator's guide with yapp. Ok, it's on the TODO list.

This is the third time I've tried to report that the word wrap problem isn't completely fixed. I loose part of words, and small words from sight under the right slider of my browser. But before I can get the message submitted, I lose the cache and my mess age disappears. I follow instructions to hit reload, but whatever I wrote in this form box is gone. So you've got two problems: 1) word wrap is too wide and 2) cache is too short.

OK Dave, over to you on this one. What's the fix for this? I haven't been having a problem with the word wrap, though, it seems to be working fine here. I wonder what's different about Karen's setup? Or why she's having these problems? And I'm wondering why some of the text in the apps conference introductions is double spaced.

Dave, here's a crucial issue to getting our Stroud site up. Forrest doesn't want to link until we fix the error message when you try to log in to a topic without having an account or password. We need to error trap and have a message pop up with a url to the registration area. That way, users can come directly from the Stroud site to a related topic without having an account and still stay within the topic. Perhaps the error message would say "click here to register".

What's the quick command in yapp to add a new conference?

The following is the help file from yapp. Syntax: cfcreate Description: This command can only be run by the conference administrator, and is used to create a new conference. When run, Yapp will prompt for a short conference name (used to join it), a one line description, the conference directory, logins or UIDs of fairwitnesses, the conference type (see 'help security'), and email address if the conference is linked to a mailing list (see 'help maillist'). See also: list, join, cfdelete

I added word wrap to the web text entry boxes but it wraps too wide for the telnet window that I use. Is there anyway to increase the margins on the word wrap and make it match the word wrap margins that you get in a telnet session? I'm writing this in a telnet session. My next response will be in a web browser text entry box. You'll see the difference.

OK now I'm entering text in the text entry box on the web. By the way, can folks start deleting some of the useless test items they've created in this yapp conference. That would be a good way to test the kill feature of yapp. So how am I doing on word wrap?

OK. I lied. It looks already to me. But I know some other folks have been having a problem with this.

On second look, the text does look too wide. Do other folks see this?

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > By the way, can folks start deleting some of the useless test items > they've created in this yapp conference. That would be a good way > to test the kill feature of yapp. That's the host's job. Once others have responded to a topic, the author can no longer kill the topic.

What about the wrapping problem on the web. When the web-entered items appear in a telnet session, they wrap in the middle of words and they go right to the very edge of the telnet window without leaving any margins. What's the cure for this?

One of my users got the following error message when trying to log in to www.spring.com and invoke the bbs command: login username -- invoking bbs -n Got error 13 (Permission denied) in opening /usr/bbs/license/registered Couldn't open and lock /usr/bbs/license/registered (euid=188) There are already 0 copies being used. Try again later. Couldn't get license for www.spring.com There were no other users logged in when this user tried this.

Yapp WWW Administrator writes: > What about the wrapping problem on the web. When the web-entered items > appear in a telnet session, they wrap in the middle of words and they go > right to the very edge of the telnet window without leaving any margins. > What's the cure for this? Add: wrap=70 to your /usr/bbs/rc file.

Dave, Kym here. Yesterday, I was trying to center the header buttons and the footer buttons. From the public_read_header I tried to center the buttons up top. When I did this, the horizontal line disappeared. When I tried to center the buttons on the public_read_footer page, it whiped out the references to the apps conference and main menu. The same was for the read_header page and the read_footer page. I restored everything back to the original format so that those things that came up missing are there now. Would you know why that would be happening?

Dave, Kym here. Yesterday, I was trying to center the header buttons and the footer buttons. From the public_read_header I tried to center the buttons up top. When I did this, the horizontal line disappeared. When I tried to center the buttons on the public_read_footer page, it whiped out the references to the apps conference and main menu. The same was for the read_header page and the read_footer page. I restored everything back to the original format so that those things that came up missing are there now. Would you know why that would be happening?

I suspect the horizontal line problem was due to your HTML, in which case you should just look for examples of HTML that does what you want (in an HTML book or other pages on the web or whatever). The references to the apps conference and main menu are generated by the confreturn and mainreturn macros, which are inside the footer macro (all three of which you will find on the System Customization page). If the "footer" macro was deleted from the read footers, that would of course cause the links to go away. Whether that was what happened is something we can't tell without more information.

Kym must have double clicked. Is there a way to trop for double clicking so it only accepts one mouse click?

And how do I go back and edit a previous response The command in caucus is ch response xx

Paul Terry Walhus writes: > And how do I go back and edit a previous response > The command in caucus is ch response xx edit xx

How do we get a blank line in between the item header and the item text? I finally got the item header like I want it except for that lack of an extra line, example: Topic 3 of 279: 'What are your favorite apps?' Response 11 of 11: Marc Y. Paulin (XTreme) Wed, Aug 14, 1996 (10:13) 7 lines Oh yes, please! Pump 'em up! :-) I like Usenet because I just have to fire up Agent, let him do his work and come back later to find all the latest posts waiting for me to be read. I don't have to stay on-line. But that's okay. I'm enjoying this place so anything will suit me. :-) Here's the code I used, in case it gets blown away again: def rsep"\n Topic %i of ${lastitem}: '%h'\n Response %r of %n: %a (%l) %d %s lines" The above is all on one line of course.

To enter a newline into your defined separators you would need to add a \n before the closing quotation mark. "\n" creates a newline "\t" creates a tab in the unix enviornment.

Dave, I'm still finding that my text goes off the page where I can't see it on the right margin. It only goes over about 3 or 4 characters. Is it possible for you to narrow the margin-width still further on the word wrap. It's very irritating, for example , to not be able to see the word "for" in the preceding sentence.

I just submitted a suggestion, but I don't see it displayed. So here goes again: The wordwrap still is too wide. I can't see about 3-4 characters that go off the right margin. (For example, in the preceeding sentence, the word "the" is not visible.) Can y ou narrow the character width of the word wrap in this entry field?

I just submitted a suggestion, but I don't see it displayed. So here goes again: The wordwrap still is too wide. I can't see about 3-4 characters that go off the right margin. (For example, in the preceeding sentence, the word "the" is not visible.) Can y ou narrow the character width of the word wrap in this entry field?

We need double click prevention, Dave. Is this possible?

We're getting lots of server errors and we have a critical demo coming up soon Dave. Please look into these. For example: http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/public/read/apps/91 Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@spring.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

Still getting those errors after rebooting the server just now.

It's working now. Somehow, the participation file for the www account for the apps conference got corrupted, which caused Yapp to crash since it wasn't doing enough error checking. I've currently fixed the participation file, so things are working again, and I will install a fixed version of Yapp so this won't happen again probably sometime tomorrow (Thursday).

When you installed the new software you blew away the buttons that appeared in the public area that said 'login' and 'signup' that we created. How do we restore these? *urgent*

%{header} %{zprev}%{znext}%{help}

Paul writes: > When you installed the new software you blew away the buttons that appeared > in the public area that said 'login' and 'signup' that we created. How > do we restore these? *urgent* Um, I'm confused. When I go to (for example) http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/public/read/dsm/1 I do see signup and login buttons. (And I haven't change any templates or scripts recently.) -Dave

I fixed it before you posted this, thanks Dave.

Dave/ Can you fix cfcreate so that it works? I even tried makeing it executable and that didnt' work.

I was referring to using cfcreate from a shell prompt. It won't execute. It would probably be much faster to create conferences from a unix prompt but I have yet to create my first one. Also, we just built a new machine called conf.netrabbit.com and I'd like to install NetRabbit's yapp there and keep this as the Spring's yapp license. Can you just copy all of this code over and leave it here also? Or, with your permission, we could copy it over.

correction: the above should read conf.netrabbit.net. I'll ask Matt to create a thalerd account there.

Yapp WWW Administrator writes: > Dave/ Can you fix cfcreate so that it works? I even tried makeing it executable and that didnt' work. cfcreate should be owned by cfadm, mode 700. Also, it should only be run by cfadm. -Dave

I tried su'ing to cfadm but that didn't seem to work.

webuser in the /usr/bbs/bin directory where cfcreate is located works fine logged in as root. But won't execute as cfadm. cfcreate won't work loggend in either as root or cfadm.

When you go to create a new conference on the web there are a couple of problems: 1. a broken gif on the link to create a conference 2. The access value box is always 0, even if you change it. I just created a media conference and it would accept and store the number 16 even with repeated retries. Is this number supposted to be automatically generated by the boxes you click in the various access level choices?

In yesterday's email: Subject: bug in yapp Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 11:04:07 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew McClure To: terry@well.com Hi, I got your mail about Wm's conference. I went there and twice had the unpleasant experience of resizing the Netscape window I was typing in and having all the text I'd typed disappear. Any clues as to what he's talking about here Dave?

The biggest single problem with yapp 3.0 remains the way text looks in a telnet session that was created on a web page. It's very awkward, we tried the fixes mentioned above, but they seem to do much good. We'd like it so that lines wrap cleanly after 70 characters or so. Any more suggestions on this?

To get lines to wrap at 70 chars in telnet mode, all you need to do is put "wrap=70" in /usr/bbs/rc. -Dave

OK I added line wrap. Let's see the results now.

OK, I'm entering this response on the web so this should be a good test of how the line wrap is working out now. I set wrap=69 and I may reduce it even more pending the output of this test. Another email from a user about some problems (Jeff is with Texas Monthly): Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 08:59:33 -0500 (CDT) To: terry Hello! I've been able to log on via Telnet, but Netscape still won't let me get in. And whenever I try to read a topic, I get several screenfuls atonce, socan only read the last part of the topic. I tried going hrough the Settings menu, but in the Termina l Type choice, there seems to be a bug--I type the number to change my terminal type, and I get the Internet Services menu. Any clues on this?

> Hello! I've been able to log on via Telnet, but Netscape still won't > let me get in. This sounds like a Netscape problem. > And whenever I try to read a topic, I get several > screenfuls atonce, socan only read the last part of the topic. This sounds like either there is no pager defined, or the user's screen size is set wrong. Since there is a default pager defined on the spring, I suspect the latter. > I tried > going hrough the Settings menu, but in the Terminal Type choice, there > seems to be a bug--I type the number to change my terminal type, and I > get the Internet Services menu. This sounds like an error in the menus. None of the above are really problems with Yapp, so further discussion on this should be directed to me (or someone else) personally since they're not really relevant to others on this list. Dave

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.