BIRTHDAY GREETER 1.0 Copyright 1993 by: Studio, Eh? Productions All rights reserved -=*What it does*=- Birthday Greeter will automatically create a logon screen or bulletin with the current months birthdays of your users. It is designed for use with TriBBS 5.x and will create the bulletin/logon screen in the .bbs format using the @-codes for color. As sysop you may configure four color choices, whether to use aliases or the user's names, and whether to make a bulletin or a logon screen from it. -=*The legal stuff*=- Birthday Greeter 1.0 is a copyrighted program and may not be sold, altered, or otherwised messed with without the written permission of either the author or Studio, Eh? Productions. Please see later in this file for cost. -=*Guarantee*=- This program is released "as is" and is not guaranteed to do ANYTHING but take up space on your harddrive. The author has tested it on his own system and it works fine... but neither the author nor Studio, Eh? Productions will be held liable for any damages whatsoever that may arise from the use of this program. -=*How to use it*=- First create a directory for Birthday Greeter and copy the files into the directory. The only needed files in the directory are the .exe and .cfg file. Next, edit the config file for your board. This is a simple textfile and you may edit it with any text editor. I've included a sample, BIRTHDAY.CFG, but you may call the config file whatever you wish. Below is a line-by-line description of the .cfg file... BBSName=THE LEFT-HAND PATH NameFlag=U Month=11 Color1=*GREEN Color2=YELLOW Color3=*MAGENTA Color4=*BLUE DatPath=C:\TRIBBS\MWORK\USERS.DAT ScreenPath=C:\TRIBBS\DISPLAY\LOGON#.BBS Please make sure that there are no spaces between the equal sign (=) and your entry. Also, everthing to the left of the equal sign must be EXACTLY as printed above. Line 1 is pretty self explanatory. Substitute your bbs's name for mine! :) Line 2 is for which name to use. Put a U there if you want to use the User name and an A there if you want the screen/bulletin to use the alias. Line 3 needs to be done in the two-digit format, i.e. January is 01 NOT 1, February is 02 NOT 2, etc. When you first set it up put the current month in there, as you will want to run the program "manually" the first time. When it's done making the screen/bulletin it will edit the .cfg file so that it won't keep overwriting the screen or bulletin (more on this later). Lines 4 - 7 are your color choices. The program produces a header, the main body of the text (i.e. the birthdays), and then a footer. Color1 and Color2 are the two colors that will alternate for the birthday entries. Color3 and Color4 are the two colors that will alternate for the header and footer. The background color is always black. Your color choices for the foreground are as follows... BLUE GREEN CYAN RED MAGENTA BROWN WHITE YELLOW *BLUE *GREEN *CYAN *RED *MAGENTA *WHITE Putting the asterisk (*) in front of the colors indicates you want the bright version of them. Please make these entries in ALL-CAPS (as shown). If you don't want the colors to alternate on the birthday entries and/or the header/footer, simply put the same color in the two lines that deal with them. Line 8 is the path to your USERS.DAT file. It is located in your main node's MWORK directory. Please note that you must include the complete path AND filename on this line. Line 9 is the path and filename to your logon screen or bulletin. In the example it is to do a LOGON#.BBS, where # is replaced by whichever logon screen you want it to be. The same set up goes for if you wish to make a bulletin, except the filename would be BULLET#.BBS (or BULLET##.BBS). Note that you can run the program twice, each with a different config, and turn out both a logon screen and a bulletin (if you so desire). -=*Running the program*=- You should run it the first time by changing to the directory where the .exe and .cfg file are and type in: birthday birthday.cfg and then hit . Of course, if you called your config file something besides birthday.cfg, you'd type that in instead. This will make a screen or bulletin for the current month and then edit the config file to reflect the next month. Now put an entry in your daily maintenance batchfile something like this: cd c:\tribbs\birthday <--- change to BIRTHDAY's directory birthday birthday.cfg <--- the command line {more batch stuff} <--- continue with your daily .bat That's it! When the daily .bat is run, BIRTHDAY GREETER will check to see what the current month is. If it doesn't match what's in the .cfg file it will simply print "Screen already produced for this month" and quit, returning control to your batchfile. So if you start it up in mid-January for instance, it won't make a new screen or bulletin until your daily .bat runs on February 1st. If you want to do both a screen and a bulletin, you make one config file for each and then the .bat's entry would say something like: cd c:\tribbs\birthday birthday bday1.cfg birthday bday2.cfg {more batch stuff} -=*So... what does this cost?*=- Nothing. I'm releasing this program as FreeWare to all registered TriBBS sysops. Enjoy! -=*Support*=- Since it is FreeWare, I'm not going to spend an inordinate amount of time on support. If you discover a bug, or if you have some trouble installing it, you may send me a letter (include an S.A.S.E. please) and I will do my best to fix the problem. My address is: Mark Alan Pruitt c/o Studio, Eh? Productions 2318 - 2nd Ave #337-A Seattle, WA 98121 I have written (and am writing) a number of programs, both Free and ShareWare, for BBS's and general computing use. Sending a disk (720k minimum) and a pre-paid mailer will get you a copy of all the latest versions of my programs. -=*A quick tech note*=- The executable has been compressed using Tinyprog (free plug... Tinyprog is an EXCELLENT and inexpensive program... you other programmer types should look into it... and no... I didn't write it! :) ) so that while it only takes up 28592 bytes on your hard drive it's load image (how much RAM it needs) is 35562 bytes. Happy computing!!! Mark Alan Pruitt Seattle, WA November 16, 1993