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- scribble2, a gift to picospan users, written by Andrew Scott Beals
-
-
- One of the Tenants of life here on the WELL is simple:
- You Own Your Own Words.
- This means that you are responsible for them. This also means that
- you may withdraw them at any time.
-
- If you have been participating in a conferencing system for a long time,
- in my case over four years, you find that you have visited many conferences
- and made many entries into the system. Going around, looking for and removing
- these postings can take quite some time, too long for this programmer. So
- I have automated the task of:
- 1. Finding all of your postings
- 2. Determining which have already been censored/scribbled.
- 3. Censoring and scribbling the remainder.
-
- scribble2 takes one argument, the name of a file that has the names of
- the conferences in which you wish to censor and scribble your words.
-
- After answering the three questions, it will then put itself into the
- background and send you two pieces of mail - one containing the standard
- output [which topics you censored yourself in] and the other with the standard
- error output, which contains error messages like "can't censor in frozen
- topics".
-
- Note that this tickles a "feature" in picospan in that Marcus Watts decided
- that it would be best if everyone knew that someone had censored or scribbled
- a posting in a quiescent topic. Thus, the topic header shows up but no
- new postings show, as there aren't really any new postings to show.
-
- CAVEATS:
-
- This program runs on BSD. The only BSD-ism in the code, I believe, is that
- it calls mail program /usr/ucb/Mail and expects that it can take the
- -s "subject text" argument. The latter is not a necessary feature.
-
- scribble2_worker can easily be modified into a "find all of my [or a
- specified user's] postings and report" program. I may still do this
- today, If only so that I may ask that all of my postings in the frozen
- topics may be scribbled.
-
-