Group Helpers

Group Helpers are Resource Helpers that have been indexed into a Hunt Group. This concept is best illustrated with an example.

Say your local bulletin board has several lines and hence several telephone numbers. In most instances, the Sysop would have asked the telephone company to put these numbers in a hunt group, so you only have to call one number and you get connected to the first free line. In this case you would set up a single Resource Helper and probably make it retry several times.

However, sometimes Sysops don't do this, or maybe you want to try the telephone number first, and then maybe try via the local Packet Switch Network. In both these circumstances you can create a Group of Helpers, all with the same name, but with different indices (the index is the number in the box after the helper name).

Because they all have the same name, there will only be one entry in the "Helpers" menu (i.e. 'Atlantis'). However, when you select "Atlantis" from the "Helpers" menu, Black Night will notice that it's a Group Helper and will try each one in turn until one of them connects, or you cancel the attempt.

If you want Black Night to quickly step through each one, you should probably set the number of retries in each helper to be fairly low (e.g. 1 or 2), because Black Night will only step onto the next helper when the Connection Tool reports that it has "Failed to Connect". Alternatively you can select "Next Helper" from the "Helpers" menu if you want to immediately move onto the next helper. Because some third party Connection Tools don't return proper error codes, there is also an option to "Stop Group Help". Selecting "Stop Group Help" from the helpers menu unconditionally breaks the helper chain and prevents any further stepping.