CICA 1993 August

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Text File | 1992-10-28 | 13.3 KB | 303 lines

WRN v0.93 beta ============== What is WRN? ============ WRN is a Windows-based Usenet news and mail user interface for the DOS-based Waffle v1.65 UUCP news & mail system. WRN provides easy-to-use, icon-based access to mail and/or news which Waffle has downloaded from a Unix host. The user may then reply to or send mail, or post news items. These are stored by WRN, ready for Waffle to upload to the host site when it next connects. WRN is designed for a single user who has been using Waffle simply as an offline Unix mail/news system. To this end: * There is no login/password mechanism * Once a newsgroup has been read, it is deleted Registration ============ This is a beta-test version of WRN. You may use it for up to one month, after which you should register it. Registered users will be able to upgrade their registration to new versions when they are released. This is distributed as share-ware; you may make as many copies as you wish, and distribute them wherever you wish, so long as the entire contents of this archive are kept together, and not modified. As an incentive to registration, this program displays a reminder screen when it is started, and always appends an "Unregistered user" signature to messages you send. Both of these are disabled when you register. Registration costs US$10. This may be sent to me as a cheque, money order, cash or whatever, in any currency you like, so long as I can convert it to about the equivalent of US$10 here in NZ. Funds should be sent to: Tech-Soft Systems 101 Epuni St Lower Hutt Wellington New Zealand. In return, I'll send you a UserCode to plug into WRN to make the incentives go away. You'll also be encouraging me to produce more shareware (let's keep the price of software down). You'll also get a nice warm righteous feeling in the pit of your tummy... Setting up WRN ============== WRN is written in Visual Basic, so VBRUN100.DLL must be accessible in your PATH. VBRUN100.DLL is freely available from many sites; it is not included in this archive to reduce network load and file transmission times. As mentioned earlier, WRN is a user interface for Waffle 1.65. You must first install Waffle and get it running correctly, downloading files and uploading replies. I won't describe that process here, partly because it is long and involved, partly because it's described in the Waffle documentation, and partly because it's not really my problem. Once Waffle is working correctly, you can probably discard large parts of it. You're now ready to get WRN itself set up and runnign. You need to create a file called WRN.INI in the directory from which you will be running WRN. I suggest that you keep all the WRN files in the same directory. WRN.INI will contain 17 lines of plain ASCII text (terminated by CRLF), with one entry per line. It is a standard Windows .INI file. I've included my WRN.INI file in this release as an example The following entries are required: [WRN] The group identifier UseNetFile Location of your Waffle newsgroups file. This is normally called USENET and located in your WAFFLE\SYSTEM directory. It contains a list of all the newsgroups that Waffle expects/knows about, and the directories where it places articles belonging to these newsgroups. e.g. UseNetFile=C:\WAFFLE\SYSTEM\USENET NewsDir Name of your Waffle news directory. This is the "root" of the directory structure in which Waffle will place your news articles. e.g. NewsDir=C:\WAFFLE\NEWS\ QuotePrefix This string is added to the beginning of each line when you reply to a mail or news message. e.g. QuotePrefix="> " StaticFile The name and location of your Waffle STATIC file. This will be in the same directory as your USENET file. It contains information that Waffle needs for communications, etc. Some of that is useful to WRN too. e.g. StaticFile=c:\waffle\system\static UserID Your username on your Waffle system. This is used by Waffle (& WRN) to locate your mail, and included as part of your Email address. e.g. UserID=frank UserCode This number will be sent to you when you register WRN. It is calculated from your full name. After registering, you'll be able to add your own signature to your messages, and the introductory reminder screen won't appear. e.g. UserCode=12345 TimeZone Your time-zone: appended to the date and time of your messages. e.g. TimeZone=NZT SiteID Your site's "Internet name". Typically this will be a name, you've chosen tacked onto the front of the name of the site you get your newsfeed from. e.g. SiteID=whare.cavebbs.welly.gen.nz UserName Your full name; put whatever you like here, but if you change it, you're going to have to re-register. e.g. UserName=Frank van der Hulst Organisation Your organisation's name: included in outgoing message headers. Put whatever you like here. e.g. Organisation=Tech-Soft Systems, Wellington, NZ MailOutDir Directory where outgoing mail is stored until it can be uploaded to your host site. Waffle on my system uses my host's siteID as part of the path. The spool variable in my WAFFLE/SYSTEM/STATIC points to C:\SPOOL. e.g. MailOutDir=c:\spool\cavebbs SeqFile The name of Waffle's outgoing sequence file. Waffle keeps track of outgoing messages by storing the number of the last message sent (or is it the next message to send) in a file in its UUCP directory. My WAFFLE/SYSTEM/STATIC file's dialers variable points to the same directory. e.g. SeqFile=c:\waffle\uucp\sequence NewsReply Directory to store your outgoing news postings until they can be uploaded to your host site. These files are stored in a different format from outgoing mail, and in a different directory. You will need to delete messages from here periodically, otherwise your disk will gradually fill up with out-of-date replies. I've created a directory off the WAFFLE\NEWS directory, but you can put them wherever you want. e.g. NewsReply=c:\waffle\news\reply NewsOutList File to store a list of replies until they are batched and sent to your host. This name is created by appending your host's name to SPOOL\COMPRESS e.g. NewsOutList=c:\spool\compress\cavebbs SigFile Location of your signature file. After registering WRN, you will be able to add a signature to the end of outgoing messages. The signature file may be as long as you like, containing ASCII text. You may find it convenient to use the same signature file as Waffle uses. e.g. SigFile=c:\user\frank\mailsig UUDecode The name of your UUDecode executable program. This allows you to specify what program WRN should execute when you select its UUDecode function. WRN will execute this program, with the full path of the currently selected message as a command-line parameter. There is no support for multi-part messages. I recommend Extract 3.00, which is a shareware program written by Darren E. Penner. EXTRACT is free to individuals who should register with Darren. Corporate/Educational cost is $10. Darren can be contacted by Email at dpenner@ee.ualberta.ca or by snail mail to Darren E. Penner #904-17327 69th Avenue Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5T 3S8 e.g. UUDecode=c:\windows\util\extract.exe Starting WRN ============ Change to the directory where WRN.INI and WRN.HLP are located (I suggest putting these files in the same directory as WRN.EXE), then run WRN.EXE. You could do this * from PROGMAN's Run command, * by creating an icon in a PROGMAN group * by using a PIF file * from an icon bar such as CLYSMIC Using WRN ========= Across the top of the WRN form is a "tool-bar"; a set of icons to perform various functions. They are (from left to right): * Catchup -- Delete all messages in current newsgroup * New -- Write a new message for mail/posting * Load -- Load a text file for mail/posting * Save -- Save a message to disk * Cancel -- Cancel a reply/new message * Rot-13 -- Decrypt encrypted messages * Mail -- Send a message as mail * News -- Post a message to a newsgroup * UUDecode -- Decode a UUEncoded file from a message * About -- Informaation about WRN * Help -- Read WRN.HLP (this file) Below the tool-bar are two list boxes; the left-hand one (yellow background) shows newsgroups (including MAIL if you have some mail waiting) which contain messages. A newsgroup may be selected by clicking (why does Windows need double-clicks every-where?) once on the group you want to read. The right-hand list box (green background) contains a list of message subjects (and authors) in the currently selected newsgroup. Click on the message you want to read, it appears in the large message-box (white background) at the bottom of the screen. To reply via Mail, click on the message-box (quote marks should appear at the beginning of each line) & edit it. Use the Mail icon to send mail; you will be prompted for a Subject, and who to send it to. You also get the chance to add a signature (contained in a file specified in WRN.INI) to the end of your message. If you have second thoughts, use the Cancel icon. Similarly, to follow-up to a newsgroup, click on the message-box, edit it, and use the News icon to post it; you will be prompted for a Subject, Newsgroups to post to, and whether to append your signature file. To send new mail or post new news to a newsgroup, click on the New icon, then type your message in the message window, followed by clicking on either the Mail or the News icon. To mail or post an ASCII file, click on the Load icon... You will be prompted for the source drive/path/filename. When you've selected the file, it will be loaded into the message-box, and can then be sent by clicking on the Mail or News icon. The Save icon is used to save the displayed message to a file...a dialog box allows you to select the destination drive/path/filename. If the file already exists, the message is appended to the existing file. Note that this saves the entire file, including the header. To decrypt a message which has been Rot-13'ed, use the Rot-13 icon. Similarly, to encrypt a message in Rot-13 format, use the Rot-13 icon. To extract a file which has been UUEncoded, select the UUDecode icon. This will run the external UUDecode program specified in your WRN.INI file. The Catch-up icon DELETES ALL MESSAGES in the selected newsgroup/mail. WRN was designed for a system like mine... one user downloading newsgroups and/or mail overnight. So once you've read the group there's no need to keep it clogging your disk. The Help icon will bring up a form which displays the WRN.HLP file (that is, this file). You may like to customise this file... feel free to. PLANNED IMPROVEMENTS ==================== * Proper context-sensitive help * Fix a problem which (because of strange internals in VB) limits messages 16K. Currently, if one is displayed which is more than 16K, WRN will beep at you and add a "*** Truncated ***" line to the beginning of the displayed text. If you select Save, it will still save the *entire* file. * Allow cutting and pasting via the clipboard. * One alpha-tester asked for Catch-up to work like Waffle... (i.e. don't delete old messages) so that it can be used in a multi-user system. If more people ask, that may be added (although I like it like this :-) * Combo-box for newsgroups. * Any other suggestions?? FEEDBACK ======== Please send any comments (both positive and negative) or suggestions to me so that I can improve this product. That still applies even if you don't register. I can be reached via Internet Email at: f_vander@comp.vuw.ac.nz frank@cit.ac.nz frank@whare.cavebbs.welly.gen.nz If you don't have Internet access, you could even resort to Snail-mail.