Subj : Who is dumping fsx posts into dovenet?
To   : Al
From : Oli
Date : Wed Jan 11 2023 11:32:43

Al wrote (2023-01-10):

 >>> QWK networking works well.

 >> I wonder why I'm seeing lots of mails without a REPLY kludge in
 >> FSX_NET.

 A> I just took a quick look back in the FSX_NET area and every message I
 A> looked at had a REPLY kludge.

View it in a threaded reader and FSX_NET is a mess. Fidonet and Usenet from the 90s as I know it was way better. But in Europe QWK was not that popular and most people used real FTN (point) software.

 A> It can happen though that messages posted
 A> with a QWK reader don't get a reply kludge because the QWK implementation
 A> doesn't know what the MSGID of the original message is. That's a short
 A> coming of the impementation.

Yes and no. Of course it can be done, but for some reason it regularly breaks. It might be the horrible format that makes your brain hurt or lack of good documentation.

Look at SOUP. That's a simple/understable and well designed. QWK is stuff like:

    Header    Field
   Position   Length   Description
    --------   ------   ----------------------------------------
    22        25        Uppercase name of person message is TO
    47        25        Uppercase name of person message is FROM
    72        25        Subject of message
    [...]
    117       6         Number of 128-byte chunks in the actual
                        message (includes header and is coded in
                        ASCII)

    Start  Field
    Byte   Length   Description
    ----   ------   --------------------------------------------
    1      4        This is a floating point number in the MSBIN
                    format. This number is the record number of
                    the message header in MESSAGES.DAT that
                    corresponds to this message.
    5      1        This byte is the conferece number of this
                    message. This byte can (and should) be
                    ignored as it is duplicated in the message
                    header in MESSAGES.DAT. This is especially
                    important for conferences numbered higher
                    than 255.

    Let's stray just a moment to talk about the MSBIN floating
    point format. This is the format used by the older Microsoft
    Basic compilers and interpreters. Most compiler manufacturers
    have switched to the more efficient IEEE floating point
    format. Therefore, we must have a method of converting to and
    from MSBIN format. Included at the end of this article are
    two routines in C that accomplish this quite easily.


And then there have to be some extensions to work around the limitations (e.g. 25 chars fields). Were is this documented? Is this the "standard" everyone should be using?
http://wiki.synchro.net/ref:qwk

Do we have a list of good QWK readers? (= long name/subject fields, reply-id, ...)

How are other charsets than CP437 (and UTF-8) are transmitted?

Is there other software than Synchronet which supports all these HEADER.DAT extensions?

It's easy to network within the monoculture of Synchronet's QWK, but how reliable does it work with other BBS software?

 >>> QWK is not the the issue here, someone misconfigured something and
 >>> crossed up DOVE-Net and fsxNet got linked up somehow.

 >> But how does it happen? Did someone name the DOVE-Net Sysops conference
 >> fsx_gen on disk? Or is it related to the ingenious QWK Conference
 >> numbers?

 A> I'm not sure how it happened. I suspect someone used area number 3002
 A> when they meant 2002. Those area numbers are important. Area 2002 is just
 A> as unique and the area tag ASIAN_LINK, if you enter it wrong something
 A> wrong will happen.

Tada!

Conference numbers were a bad design decision. It might be okay for downloading QWK packages by users, but for networking it's a recipe for exactly that kind of errors and mistakes (and I wouldn't be surprised if it often enough breaks with offline reading too).


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 * Origin: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. (21:3/102)

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