                 Citadel Basics - The System Overview

    Citadel is a room-structured message system.  The fundamental
design goal was to provide a congenial forum conducive to interesting
discussions.  The software is intended to be as unobtrusive, easy to use,
and unconstraining as possible.  In software as elsewhere, good engineering
is whatever gets the job done without calling attention to itself.

    The fundamental design metaphor is that of a building consisting of
a series of independent rooms, each of which hosts a discussion devoted
to a particular topic.	Messages are stored and retrieved in chronological
order within each room.  Messages are formatted to the caller's screen width.

     Callers may travel freely between the rooms, reading old messages and
posting new ones.  New rooms may be created at will, and old ones are
deleted when they empty of messages.

    The fundamental Goto, Read and Enter commands have been streamlined
as much as possible.  The message display format has a minimum of
unnecessary noise:  the topic is implicit in the message's location
within a room, no explicit TO field is present, no message ID # is
printed, no redundant "END OF MESSAGE" blurbs etc.  The most common Goto,
Read and Enter commands are all single-key.  Citadel automatically
skips rooms which have no new messages, and old messages in the
current room.  (Less concise commands are of course available to
override this.)

    Private person-to-person mail is supported.  Private rooms can
host restricted conferences.  Once visited, private rooms behave exactly
like regular rooms to the participants, but they are not accessable to
others who don't know the name of the room.  The sysop can set up some
rooms to be windows onto designated disk/directories.  These directory
rooms support the usual message functions, but also allow one to
to do directory listings by wildcard match, or to upload and download
files via various protocols.

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