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WHATSNEW.10B
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1992-03-09
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What's New - V1.00b
===================
- Slightly fixed RAPMAINT.EXE and MAKERAP.EXE. Some cosmetic problems
but they were otherwise working just fine.
- Gave y'all a larger set of default actions and talktypes.
- Included RAPFIX, which solves some DORINFO1.DEF problems on some
systems.
- Included the new RAPEDIT, which lets you edit your RAP userfiles.
What's New - V1.00
==================
Finally, it's good enough to be released!
Features new to this version include:
- Personal actions now *WORK*. Yes, your users can set up "custom"
actions that only they can activate.
- Faster file-handling routines. Essentially, two "index" files were
created to speed up searching. This is PARTICULARLY noticeable when
searching the userfile, which is bloody MONSTROUS nowadays! CAUTION:
you must prepare your system for this new version of RAP (see below).
- Couple of hard-to-kill bugs swatted (I think), including one where the
system would occasionally go brain-dead and lose track of where the
cursor is. I think I got that one (jackhammer approach, used liberal
LOCATE statements).
Upgrading from *ANY* previous version:
Because RAP now needs two new index files, you cannot simply just copy
the new .EXE files into your RAP directory and expect it to work. It
certainly will not.
Copy all the files from this archive into your working RAP directory
(well, maybe ya don't need the RAP.DOC and WHATSNEW.100 files, but you
get the idea). Next, run RAPMAINT 100 (or some other high number).
This will automatically clean the userfile and, as a result, build the
new USERS2.RAP indexfile. Finally, run MAKERAP CLEAN once, which, as
part of its cleanup procedures, will build a new NODEIDX2.RAP indexfile.
And that's it! Easy, huh?
One final thing: when running multiple RAP sessions under Desqview,
things can get a bit slow. Part of the problem here is that I have *NO*
idea how, in the QuickBASIC environment, to release Desqview timeslices.
Thus, each copy of RAP demands and gets its full timeslice, even if its
just sitting there waiting for input. Rats. If anyone can assist me in
this regard I'd be delighted to hear from them! See the end of RAP.DOC
for info on how to contact me.
What's New - V0.90ß
===================
Boy, am I an idiot!
Seems that the RA environment variable generally points to individual
subdirectories and *NOT* to the directory where USERON.BBS is located
(see WHAT'S NEW V0.88). Therefore WIPEUSER was goofing up and writing
USERON.BBS into the wrong directory.
This has been fixed: WIPEUSER must now be run from the directory in
which USERON.BBS resides, usually the one defined in RACONFIG as the
SYSTEM DIRECTORY.
Next... Personal Actions are now *HERE*. Users can program up to four
personal actions that only they can use. TalkTypes, I'm afraid, are
*NOT* available for user programming... :-) Most users have trouble
figuring them out, anyways...
What's New - V0.88ß
===================
I shoulda seen this coming....
All my testing of RAP's interaction with USERON.BBS went flawlessly
because I had a perfectly formatted USERON.BBS file, thanks to the
author of SabreChat. Y'see, RemoteAccess tends to throw a lot of
GIBBERISH into this file for some reason. The SabreChat author noted
this and provided a program called "WIPE!" with his door which will
freshly format USERON.BBS each time it is run. I've been using this in
my AUTOEXEC.BAT for quite some time so this problem never even occurred
to me.
One of my beta-testers ran head-first into this problem (hiya Hazel!),
so RAP now includes WIPEUSER.EXE. Syntax is fairly simple, just type
WIPEUSER and it will format USERON.BBS to 32 nodes. Or, you can specify
your own number of nodes after the command but don't use anything *LESS*
than 32 with RAP (even though WIPEUSER will let you get away with it,
perhaps for other purposes).
Where does it create USERON.BBS? In the absence of the "RA" environment
variable, right in the current directory. If RA is defined, with a SET
RA=d:\path directive (say in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file), it will write a
fresh USERON.BBS in that directory. Needless to say, *NOBODY* should be
on your BBS when you run this program. For best results, run it in your
AUTOEXEC.BAT file, or perhaps your MIDNIGHT.BAT file. Definitely run it
at least once before trying to connect RAP with RA.
What's New - V0.87ß
===================
As you can see, lots of work between V0.63 and this one. This was the
most difficult piece of code to add, mainly cuz the RA-110 structures
aren't very damned clear to this QuickBASIC programmer. However, it
*DOES* now work.
Be sure to run the new MAKERAP CLEAN at least once: changes were made to
NODEIDX.RAP and the various NODExx.RAP files as well, so be sure they're
wiped clean before starting up this new version.
BBS<>RAP communications are now a reality. A BBS user can now page a
RAP user and vice versa, providing the new RAP.CTL file is configured
correctly (please see RAP.DOC and/or the supplied sample RAP.CTL file).
You *MUST* change your batch file or other method of loading RAP to take
into account this new file.
Specifically, USERS was changed to LOOKUP, NODES now lists BBS users as
well as RAP users, and PAGE will let a RAP user page a BBS user.
PROFILE command almost completed. Personal actions still ain't there
but you can now edit both your handle and your description (which is
displayed with the LOOKUP command).
V0.87 is now *SPECIFICALLY* tied to RemoteAccess V1.10 (and greater).
RA-110 introduced "language support". RAP doesn't exactly support this
(yet) but it does look for some very specific codes from RA...
specifically, language records 258, 496, and 497. RAP will read a page
from RemoteAccess V1.01 and earlier, but the reverse ain't true: it'll
look like crap in the BBS. RA-110 is *WELL* worth the (free) upgrade
folks, so please take the time to get it.
Many other small changes... so damned many that I can't remember half of
them (been up all node coding this beast!), but hopefully you'll stumble
upon them and smile. :-)
There will hopefully be only one more beta before full-release, and
that'll be V0.90, with the personal actions *FINALLY* enabled. This
ain't so much difficult as time-consuming and it's time to put this
thing away for a few days and let the beta-bashers have at it!
What's New - v0.63ß
===================
By popular request, actions that normally did not show to yourself now
*DO* show to yourself. IE: if you typed BOUNCE (using the supplied
ACTION.RAP file), normally you wouldn't see much except the supplied
response-back. Now you'll *ALSO* see what everyone else saw.
What's New - V0.62ß
===================
Fixed buglet involving lost carriers during new user search, which would
sometimes halt the system with "HIT ANY KEY TO RETURN TO SYSTEM".
Damned annoying, huh?
Redefined "polling" to now occur after every 1 second of inactivity,
rather than after every "x" number of cycles through the main menu loop.
On busy multitasking systems, messages were backing up for two reasons:
it would take a while before RAP would poll and if the user was a fast
typer, they'd always start a new line before the poll began. Secondly,
the rapid polling going on (remember, each copy of RAP is polling DOS
for the same file) was bogging things down. On my testing on a
LANTASTIC network things got *REALLY* bad. This has alleviated the
problem somewhat.
What's New - V0.60ß
===================
Major change to the USERS.RAP file structure. I haven't yet added the
new PROFILE options yet but I did make the file structure changes
already. Be sure to copy 055TO060.EXE into your RAP subdirectory and
run it *ONLY ONCE*. This will convert your user file so that nobody's
handles get lost. Delete 055TO060.EXE when you are through with it.
Major overhaul to the text interface with the user. Less wasted lines,
better use of ANSI color, etc. Some bugs removed (whispering would send
back a message that your message had been sent... twice). You may want
to look over and test all of your TALKTYPES carefully because I changed
the prompt slightly.
Screenclears removed from most reports.
If you had defined an action with a line 4 of "N/A", weird things would
happen if a user went ahead and tried to add a username. For example,
the default DRINK action is such a case. If one typed DRINK USERNAME,
one of two things would happen. If USERNAME was signed on, the entire
input text would be sent out as a message (as intended) to everyone.
If, however, USERNAME was not signed on, you'd get "could not find a
user named USERNAME" followed by the line 2 message. Weird. Fixed.
WHO was changed to NODES. WHO now brings up a much shorter list of who
is in the Pub. This is also displayed when you first enter RAP.
Handles are now capitalized when new users sign in. Additionally, sign
in can now be aborted without having to drop carrier. Oops!
USERS was showing all the empty log entries and, worst of all,
displaying long sequences of SPACE characters on such records... thus
REALLY slowing down the display. The SPACE chars are gone and blank
records are NO LONGER DISPLAYED.
When QUITting, one last check is now made of your buffer to get any
last-second messages.
Profiles: this is coming in a future version, probably in time for
V1.00. The idea here is that the user can enter a short description of
himself/herself for others to see. Additionally, up to four (4)
"personal" actions can be defined. *NONE* of this yet works, but as
noted above the user file structure has been changed to accomodate these
future changes. This has, as a side effect, swelled the size of
USERS.RAP considerably, it's now about 230K or so. On an active system,
however, this investment in disk space will prove worthwhile (my opinion
anyways) as it'll add a new dimension to RAP.
Also "coming soon": sure would be nice if RAP could be told to stash the
NODEIDX.RAP file in a RAMDISK instead of on the HD, right? If you're
using a disk cache (HIGHLY recommended) this won't make much difference
of course, but hey: may as well make this optional.
One other thing I want to add is better formatting on received messages.
Currently they're just blasted at the screen (and modem) as they are
(with ANSI sequences inserted). If someone just typed 300 characters at
you, they come out the modem port 300 chars in a row. Some terminals,
particularly some I've seen for Windows and GeoWorks, and also the
built-in terminal in the MilqueToast mailer, do *NOT* automatically
linefeed to the next line at the end of line (ie: at the 80th column).
RAP's output, therefore, is gonna look particularly like a dog's
breakfast on such terminals when long messages are involved. An
upcoming version will allow the user to define terminal width, and any
incoming messages will automatically be formatted with CR-LF's so that
this problem can be alleviated.
I really wish the people who write these terminal programs would STICK
TO THE BLOODY STANDARDS ESTABLISHED!!
I need more feedback, folks. I need to know what the users like, what
they dislike, and want they (and you sysops) want in the next version.
What's New - V0.57ß
===================
I found that the "poll rate" was set MUCH too high. Ya didn't notice it
so much on a local cached drive, but take away the cache, or run it
across a LAN, and things would bog down fast because each copy of RAP
was polling the NODEIDX file *VERY* often... once every 10 cycles
through the main loop. It's now happening once every 200 cycles and
this should give better performance.
NEWS.ANS or NEWS.ASC will now be displayed to the user after signon but
before "sitting down". If only NEWS.ASC exists, then only that file
will be displayed (to both ANSI and ASCII users).
Author-supplied ACTION.RAP and TALKTYPE.RAP files now greatly expanded.
There are a whole host of features coming just as soon as I have some
time to work on it.
What's New - V0.55ß
===================
First beta-release