WAFTOGT beta updates ==================== Please be sure to pick up E02/761 for support of WAFTOGT, bug fix info, and other related information. BETA 6 - 03 OCT 93 =================== 1. Some people like to go on rabidly hitting TAB until they get the cursor where they like it when they post. Unfortunately, when this gets into MMR after passing through WAFTOGT, it makes MMR die. MMR just can't handle too many consecutive TABs. So, WAFTOGT is going to play arbitrator now, and translate ALL tab characters found in news to nine spaces. This should be a solution all programs can handle. 2. Fixed a problem where messages without subject lines would be blank. Here's what the offending header looked like. Path: moes!news From: coplex!uunet!acad3.alaska.edu!FURGM Newsgroups: volcano Message-ID: <9309102320.AA01664@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1993 16:18:09 MST Sender: news@moes.coplex.com Reply-To: VOLCANO Thanks to Mike Powell for the report. 3. Found someone with a from line like: From: First Last . WTG now adds the > before parsing. Previously, that From line would kill WTG. 4. Date-related fixes... a. Date: Monday, 20 Sep 1993 17:47:12 EDT ...this is the first one I've encountered with a full day rather than just Mon, Tue, etc. b. Date fields with mixed case such as "Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1993 14:10:51 -0500 (cdt)" would throw the logic that looks for the timezone off. c. Support for AEST, MEST, and MES timezones: Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 11:52:56 AEST Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 14:10:05 MES Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 19:13:34 MEST d. Support for offsets from GMT: Date: 29 Sep 93 20:05:30 GMT+12 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 08:28:34 GMT+2 BETA 5 - 11 SEP 93 =================== The new FTP site is now operational. Releases of WAFTOGT and other RKWARE programs can now be found at: Anonymous FTP to csn.org, cd /Computech. Remember to set binary mode before getting the things you want! 1. Support for names like "Joe User" added. The "'s are now stripped when importing news. 2. Support for X.400 from fields like: From: mc/G=Brad/S=Hicks/OU=0205925@mhs.attmail.com Is now just "Brad Hicks". Note the /G= for given and /S= for surname. This only works for incoming news from mhs.attmail.com. If you find more sites posting news with this format of from field, let me know and I'll add them to the internal list. 3. Being unregistered would sometimes overflow (!). 4. Logging is now available. Here is a sample log output: (Note it says beta 4 since I hadn't given it the 5 number yet) 9-03 23:59 ; WAFTOGT 1.0á4: IMPORTING NEWS 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles imported in comp.dcom.telecom 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles imported in comp.dcom.fax 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles imported in comp.dcom.modems 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles imported in alt.folklore.computers 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles imported in alt.dcom.telecom 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles imported (total) 9-03 23:59 ; WAFTOGT 1.0á4: EXPORTING NEWS 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles exported in comp.dcom.telecom 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles exported in comp.dcom.fax 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles exported in comp.dcom.modems 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles exported in alt.folklore.computers 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles exported in alt.dcom.telecom 9-03 23:59 ; 0 articles exported (total) 9-03 23:59 ; WAFTOGT 1.0á4: DONE This should be helpful if the program bombs, since you will be able to tell where it's been getting to. Here's what an error might look like: 9-11 13:06 ; Error stop: (5/613) 7 in cmptech.test This means error 5 occurred at line 613 while reading message 7 in cmptech.test. Add LR= to the WAFTOGT.CNF to tell it where to write the logs to. 5. Very long From fields like... From: wagner@mala.bc.ca (TOM WAGNER, Wizzard of old Audio/Visual Equipment........Nanaimo Campus) ... are now supported. Too bad these guys can't trim it down a bit. It is a bit wasteful. 6. If you had a .BAK of a Waffle message, it would affect the calculation of RESETLO and RESETHI operations. Fixed. 7. Time zone "ARG" now supported. 8. The user file is now only read in when the MAILIN option is being used. This speeds up news operation for registered users. 9. From lines like: "From: (Ryan Hilbelink)" are now supported. People should not use from fields like this, since WAFTOGT has no way to determine the return path for e-mail. When it encounters names like this, it will set the reply-to field to "Unknown". People using from fields like this should make sure that they are including a Reply-To field in their posts. The fix programmed for that kind of From line also added support for from lines like: From: wintera@kenyon.edu (Andrew Q. Winter (In the [...] This guy's name goes on forever, so it gets truncated. The problem was the double parentheses (( and )) in his name. BETA 4 - 29 AUG 93 =================== Lots of stuff for this beta release! But first, some news... New releases in the future will be available by anonymous FTP at csn.org in the /Computech directory. They may also turn up at uhdux2.dt.uh.edu in /incoming, but don't rely on that one. 1. Support for another date format added: 8/6/93 8:49AM 2. Fixed a problem where if WAFTOGT couldn't determine the person's real name, sometimes it would leave it blank on the GT side. It now uses the reply-to address that appears in the message in these situations. 3. RESETLO or RESETHI, when done on a newsgroup without any articles, would either set to 9999 or 0. It will now set the pointer to 1 instead. 4. Exporting messages is now much faster than before. WAFTOGT will now only check messages that it has not updated before. You shouldn't see the "Advancing ... " so much now since it jumps right to where it needs to start working. I also received a report from Mike Powell of it going on forever. WAFTOGT now checks to see if it's gone too far, and will stop if it has. 5. The ";Reply-to" line in messages will now be generated using the Reply-To line from the article if it exists. If it does not exist, the Reply-to line in the GT message will be generated from the "From: " line of the article like before. 6. Article breaking. WAFTOGT, if given a valid number, will split posts coming into GT so that they do not contain more than that number of lines. This is quite handy if you have QWK mail users whose readers can't handle very long messages. The line to add to WAFTOGT.CNF is TR=. 7. Exporting from GT would increase the Waffle pointers too much. Fixed. 8. Someone has a nasty .sig with about 100 tab characters in it. This would cause MMR to lock up cold. To prevent such nasty things from doing that again, WAFTOGT now strips all incoming lines down to 80 characters before writing them out to the .MES or .MSG file. 9. WAFTOGT will now import E-mail from the spool directories. Here is how it works: In my poll batch file for Colorado Supernet (csn), I do the following: WAFTOGT BATCH UUCICO -SCSN WAFTOGT MAILIN G:\SPOOL\CSN UUXQT WAFTOGT The explanation: Line 1 exports messages from GT, which then get batched up by BATCH. UUCICO in line 3 then calls and does the transfer. Next, in line 4, WAFTOGT imports the E-mail before letting UUXQT get at it (more on this later). I then run UUXQT to take care of the rest, then WAFTOGT again to bring in the news. Now, the reason for importing E-mail before running UUXQT is that if someone sends e-mail to "Russell.Kroll", UUXQT will look for that user in the Waffle files. Since that person doesn't exist in the Waffle user file, it will bounce it back. We don't want that happening, so we get the message out of there. What you have to do is tell WAFTOGT to delete the incoming E-mail after writing it to the GT message base. This is accomplished by putting "KE=yes" into your WAFTOGT.CNF file. OK, I hear the questions coming - what if someone sends a message to my board and that person doesn't exist? Well, I took care of that too. Registered users may set a flag in WAFTOGT.CNF that will check the user file before importing the e-mail. (BC=YES). If you have this and KE=yes set, and the user does not exist, WAFTOGT will override the KE setting and NOT delete the message. It will still be imported to GT, however, with the name changed. "Russell Kroll" would become " Russell Kroll" to show that the message was bounced. When UUXQT sees the message sitting there and doesn't find the corresponding user, it will bounce it back. So, to re-cap: KE=yes -- kill incoming E-mail BC=yes -- check for bounces. Override KE if user not found. ** Registered users only ** 10. Registration code has been added to WAFTOGT. When registered, certain things such as bounce checking are enabled. In the future, more options will be restricted to registered users only. 11. Names such as... Dave "Spud" Kalin ...are now handled properly. Previously, the "Spud" part was just "spud". 12. The GTPATH is now checked for the WAFTOGT.CNF file if not found in the current directory. BETA 3 - 18 AUG 93 =================== 1. As promised: gating from GT back to Waffle. For this to work, WAFTOGT must be able to find RNEWS.EXE in the path so that it can export the messages. RNEWS must also be able to find COMPRESS.EXE if you are compressing outgoing news. If RNEWS can't be executed, the messages won't go out. If this happens to you and you want to re-export some messages, edit the LASTREAD.GTW in the GT directory with the MESSAGE.CTL. Be sure you setup the 4 new fields in WAFTOGT.CNF! Check the DOC file for more information on them. 2. Found yet another format of date line, this one ending with "MEZ" for the time zone. 3. Discovered if that the Date: field doesn't come within the top 9 lines or so in the Waffle article, it will die. Thanks to Sam Hale for helping me find this. BETA 2 - 14 AUG 93 =================== 0. **** The configuration file format has changed **** This was done to allow room for more improvements in the future. Please look in the included WAFTOGT.CNF file for more information. 1. If you are having problems getting Waffle to decompress the incoming mail packets and you are using the 16 bit compressor program, check your STATIC file. In COMP16.DOC, it says to use "compress : -dv" when you install it. However, that is wrong. You should change that to "compress : -dV". It took me awhile to figure that out. Hopefully this will relieve some frustration out there. I'm not sure why it works, but it uncompresses the news, and that's all that matters to me. It also seems that DESQview keeps things from working correctly. Whenever I get the setting correct for uncompressing news, it doesn't work for compressing outgoing news. I set the line for csn to just /batch so it won't run compress. My connect to them has V.42bis anyway, so it won't affect throughput much. 2. Fixed a problem where articles entered in Waffle would cause an error since there is no "Lines:" header. 3. It turns out that comp.dcom.telecom articles no longer have two CR's and now terminate lines with CRLF. I noticed some time ago that certain lines would end with CRCRLF. I'm glad that went away since it would have been a little tricky to correct. 4. Fixed another little problem where some messages would be marked as private even when they should be public. 5. Added some upper/lowercase handling routines for the "From:" field so that things like "b.j. guillot" come out as "B.J. Guillot" as they should. Since this would have made for some interesting mixes of upper and lowercase in "From" fields where WAFTOGT uses the e-mail address, I made it so that any "From" fields with an at character (@) do not get processed. This way, "rkroll%cmptech.uucp@csn.org" stays that way. 6. You can now strip out unwanted headers from the articles as they come into GT. You may have up to 50 of them. This size was picked arbitrarily, and can be expanded if anyone needs a bigger buffer. Check out the HE= line in the included WAFTOGT.CNF file for more information. The format of the actual file with the headers is just one line after another. Use caution with this, since it might lead to stripping out more than you might want. For example, if one of the lines in my header file was "Reply", then an article with a line that begins with "Reply to my post" would get that line stripped. In this case, you should use "Reply-to:" to make sure it wouldn't affect 'innocent' lines in the articles. You should use the full header line in your strip file whenever possible. 7. Added a couple more lines of code for yet another method of specifying the date of the posting: Date: 07 AUG 93 08:00 Is now properly handled. If you come across an article that makes WAFTOGT choke, please send me the Waffle .MSG file as soon as possible so that I can make a fix. With all those different kinds of newsreaders, computers, gateways, etc. out there, you can't ever be sure that all the bases are covered. Those date formats keep coming! I found a couple of new ones just today that would make WAFTOGT die. If you run into one that kills it, let me know so I can cover that format. 8. Added some "checks and balances" so that even if WAFTOGT encounters a date field that it can't handle, it won't corrupt your MESSAGE.CTL file by making the record too big. Beta 1 would occasionally put more than 128 bytes out whenever it would hit a bad date format. Beta 2 supports many more types of date fields, so this hopefully won't be needed. BETA 1 - 5 AUG 93 =================== 1. Initial release.