Subj : Downlinks and points
To   : deon
From : Oli
Date : Fri Jan 15 2021 01:16 pm

deon wrote (2021-01-15):

 Ol>> Good luck. It's still a mystery to me why everybody wants to use
 Ol>> such complicated and badly documented piece of software for
 Ol>> distributing a bunch of mails. Survival of the weirdest (software)
 Ol>> ... ;)

 d> Actually it probably is a steep learning curve, but once setup it works
 d> really well. I dont touch the hub other than to add new link (which is a
 d> few lines, which I hope to oneday automate fully).

 d> The documentation on github is pretty good, yes some options are a bit
 d> cryptic, but a post in the HUSKY echo normally gets an answer quickly.

 d> Is there something else that is useful and more user friendly as a "hub"
 d> ?

Every decent tosser should be good enough for hub stuff, AFAIK hpt was not very common in the 90s when Fidonet was way bigger. I never had a hub (only a node with points), so I don't know exactly what features I would miss that hpt provides and other tossers don't.

I thought also of nodes that aren't a hub and don't use 95% of hpt features. hpt makes Fidonet much more complicated than it is. A steep learning curve and complexity also means that it's harder to remember all the config parameters and is easier to shoot yourself in the foot.

I stopped considering hpt when I realized that it doesn't even have basic 5D support and 3D/4D had weird side effects with binkd on my system (which some experienced too, but many cannot reproduce).

Then there is the rescan bug for Squish message bases that puts the wrong time on 50% of the messages (one second off), which can cause dupes in the network. For a hub this is a really bad bug. It also created the wrong idea that the Squish format it fundamentally flawed and that Squish cannot store the original time correctly, which is not true. That this hasn't been fixed in 20+ years is astonishing.

 d> (Dont tell me Mystic, I wont believe you...)
;)

Is it open source? Is it possible that bugs get fixed by the community. That would be my first requirement for a software that runs the network backbone. So yes, hpt is better than Mystic for hub stuff (I think).

Though a interactive UI (like Mystic's) for configuration makes it easier to configure a tosser.

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