Subj : can someone help please?
To   : All
From : Jimmy Day
Date : Thu Sep 26 2002 10:50 pm

Greetings everyone!

I am a sort of newbie here, to BBS, that is, and I have
some questions that I simply can't find answers for. My computer
knowledge would be considered average or a bit above; I have the A+
cert. but when it comes to OLR, FidoNet, and all this, I'm still quite
wet behind the ears.  SO here goes with the questions -

1)  What is the difference between QWK and BW mail packets?

2)  The BBS has a Blue Wave mail door, it downloads in ZIP format - so
what happened to QWK and BW files?

3)  Some packets give the error "control.dat not found" - tried on 4
different OLRs, and PKUNZIP -t shows that there is indeed NO
control.dat file. Looks like all the other files are there.  So why no
control.dat file?  Maybe someone could point me to an explanation of the
structure of these various file types?

4)  Some packets also give unpack errors, CRC errors.  What's that mean?

5)  As for reply packets - what's the difference between *.NEW and *.REP?
Maybe one goes with QWK and the other with BW?

Please bear with me, as I guess I've been spoiled by Microsoft!  Now I
know that some folks here don't particularly like Microsoft, or at least
MS Windows, I can sure understand that!  However, that said, I will state that
in my few months of BBSing and particularly with using off-line readers,
I have gotten more error messages than with 5 years of DOS, Win3.1x,
and Win9.x put together.  Or so it seems <sigh>; it seems like one needs to
be a programmer to configure some of these OLRs, and that's way beyond my
meager abilities.

Blue Wave OLR is what I am using now, it seems logically written and was
*sort of* easy to configure.

Well, enough for now!  Thanks to all of you for any help you can offer this
lost soul!

Tallyho.

.... "Scotty, beam me up another Blue Wave message."
--- Blue Wave/386 v2.20 [NR]
 * Origin: Nerve Center - Where the spine is misaligned! (1:261/1000)

.