Subj : A reminder of the method of processing all ELIST submissions
To   : All
From : Vincent Coen
Date : Wed May 13 2020 14:08:32

Hello All!

At the moment the only method to deal with submissions is by the (old) use of
files.
These files can be the MOD-ADD, MOD-UPD or MOD-DEL submission where the
file name consists of the echotag name with an extention of .ECO so for 
example
the MBSE echo the file name would be MBSE.ECO

Now the files should be sent DIRECT to 2:25/21 using what ever bbs or mailer
tools you have, the mbse bbs has mbmsg to do this. This can be set up in your
operating systems scheduler to run every 6 months say on the first of the
month and any time that will allow it to arrive before 23:00 GMT+1 (UTC+1).

You will  need to check what your local time is in relation to GMT/UTC and
adjust the time set for the scheduler.

If you do not have software that can send the files direct then you can do the
same but as a netmail file attachment. The netmail again, must be sent DIRECT
to 2:25/21 (otherwise there is a risk that your uplink will loose the
attachment) or some one could read your passwords which is a security issue.

The content of the netmail itself can be empty as it is NOT read here it acts
simply as a mechinism to transport one or more files and after it reaches here
is discarded having saved all attached files into the inbound directory.


It is important that these files regardless of the transport system are always
sent DIRECT and may be CRASH or at least the last one sent out is so your
system will send the lot off if you are processing many submissions.


If the echo also has rules then the moderator has two options:

1.  Include within the .ECO file as the last keyword :
    RULETEXT

Followed by the rules content and this can be any number of lines but none
exceeding 75 characters wide and this is to help the older BBS to cope as some
may have been designed for working under DOS when users had a 80 column 
screen.

At then end of the rules the last line must be a line with :
-!-

This signals that this is the end of the rules.
Anything after this line will be ignored.


2. The same content as in 1 after the keyword RULETEXT but without the '---'
line can be placed in a file with the echotag as filename and an extension of
..RUL, for example for the echo MBSE it should be MBSE.RUL


If the keyword RULETEXT is being used in a submission file then the elist
program will extract the content between RULETEXT and --- creating a (wait for
it ) file echtag.RUL  and these are stored in the master directory rules which
is part of the ELST archive sent out each month or the weekly EL archive.

The weekly archive is being sent out so that sysops have a up to date copy of
the files distributed regularly while heavy updates are taking place at least
for the next few months and it is hoped that they will soon not be required -

Unless Sysops would like it to be maintained along with the monthly archive.

The monthly archive is named ELISTyymm.ZIP

The Weekly archive is named ELyymmww.ZIP

Where YY = the last two digits of the year
where mm = the month (value 01 through 12).
where ww = is the weekly number within year (value 01 through 53).

I am looking for tools that will allow the processing of submissions to be 
sent
in the body of netmails and emails but this is a long way away as so far I am
struggling to find any thing that will work but for emails - if any one has
experioence of setting up postfix please get in touch.

Likewise if you have the source of any program that can read netmails and pass
the content to another process or file again please get in touch.
This can be written in C, C++, Pascal etc using a modern compiler such as any
free one.


I hope the above information is useful.

Vincent

--- Mageia Linux v7.1 X64/Mbse v1.0.7.13/GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20180707
 * Origin: The Elist Maintainer (2:250/1)

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