PC Online 1996 October/PCO_10.ISO/filesbbs/adpt107f.arj/README.NOW

Text File | 1996-04-20 | 15.8 KB | 353 lines

April 20, 1996


The developers of AdeptXBBS have made the difficult decision to stop selling
AdeptXBBS. On April 30, 1996 our underlying license with Mark Kimes will
lapse and we will no longer have the right to sell AdeptXBBS. We have
decided that if we can't sell AdeptXBBS, we will give it away.

AdeptSoft of Boca Raton, Florida today announced the "Freeware" release of
AdeptXBBS with AdeptREXX.

In the near future, AdeptSoft will release limited source code to the public
domain to enable 3rd party developers to expand the functionality of
AdeptXBBS. AdeptSoft will continue to hold the copyright to AdeptXBBS.

AdeptSoft will periodically release new versions of the Freeware product to
fix known bugs.

AdeptSoft will discontinue its official online support concurrent with the
freeware release. The AdeptSoft Support BBS (bbs.adeptsoft.com) will close
on April 30th.

A 16 node freeware version will be released on public FTP sites. This
version will be fully functional. AdeptXBBS' Internet module will be
released as Demoware. This module is in the process of being rewritten and
the completed Internet module will be distributed at no cost to registered
sysops. The Internet Module will be made available for sale to
non-registered sysops.

It is our hope that a Freeware product will find a "market" that the
shareware product was unable to establish.

The developers of AdeptXBBS wish to thank the users, both registered and
unregistered, who have helped and supported us through the development and
launch of AdeptXBBS. Developing AdeptXBBS has been a labor of love of over 6
man years.
We wish that our "baby" had found more homes but AdeptXBBS has been on
artifical support for the12 of the last 15 months. We are no longer in the
position to devote our lives to
developing a product that cannot support itself in the marketplace. We would
have gladly continued if it weren't for the stark reality of underlying
license agreements, license payments, computer costs, Internet lines,
telephone costs, etc.

John Morris, Gordon Zeglinski and John Lawlor


02/27/96 AdeptXBBS v1.07 Release Notes

Version 1.07 Marks The Beginning Of The NEW MANAGEMENT Of AdeptSoft

      ____a note from John Lawlor, CEO -AdeptSoft____

This version (1.07) is a milestone in AdeptSoft's brief history.

We have a new President (John Morris) and a new Chief Technology
Officer (Gordon Zeglinski). As you may have heard, Steven Tower,
one of the four founding partners, is no longer an active partner
in Adeptsoft.

1.07 is the first release firmly in the capable hands of John
Morris and Gordon Zeglinski with the ever watchful eyes and
input of the Wizards of Adept. We finally have a www.adeptsoft.com
Web site (under construction... of course) and the Support BBS has
been moved up to Indiana into the very capable hands of
Julie Strietelmeier, our Head of Technical Support.

AdeptSoft is firmly committed to making AdeptXBBS the best 32-bit
BBS product on the market. We are committed to quality, timely
customer support and a rapid resolution of reproduceable bugs.

In the past, there have been too many unkept promises made
by this company. If you feel you were promised something by
someone at AdeptSoft and have not seen results, please
contact me ([e-mail]). We will do our best
to deliver on unfulfilled promises.

We want to hear from you if you love the product and we NEED
to hear about any problems that you have encountered in
dealing with anyone at AdeptSoft.


      ____a note from John Morris, President____
                         and
   ___and Gordon Zeglinski, Chief Technical Officer___
                     ___AdeptSoft___

A great deal of work has gone into AdeptXBBS 1.07 to clear up issues
that have been talked about in the various echos. Some issues have
been long standing, others crept into release 1.06 of the program.

Many, many bugs have been looked at, re-created, and we have made
fixes to correct these bugs. We have tested these bugs, but not all
scenarios get re-created during testing, so something may have
gotten by us. A list of the major bugs that have been worked on will
be included in this document, along with a list of known bugs which
we have not attempted any fixes on. If you see a bug in the list of
'bugs we have fixed' that still does not work on your system, fill
out a bug report, and send it in. We will take action on it.

Concerning bug reporting. If you have found a bug in any of the
software released by AdeptSoft. Please take the time to fill out
a bug report and send it in. We are working hard on fixing bugs
which have been reported. When reporting a bug, give us as much
relevant information as possible, including any files which may
have been contributing factors in the problem. Keep the following
in mind when reporting a problem:

"Gather enough information and the solution will be obvious"

In other words, if we have a clear, concise record of what happened,
we can generally fix the bug in a very short amount of time.

Your bug matters to us!!

Please keep in mind, we have a dedicated group of volunteer SysOps
who can also help you out with your problem. This group is known
as the The Wizards of Adept.  I'd also like to thank our spirited
Beta Testers... they spend their time searching out bugs so our
other customers won't have to be surprised.

AdeptXBBS version 1.07 is distributed as a limited trial edition.
It allows all features of the BBS software to be tested on 1 line
until May 31st, 1996. (The Internet module is not part of the base
product and is not included in the trial edition.)
After this date, the program will no longer process calls.
Registered users will not be effected by this May 31, 1996 cut off.

Starting March 15th we will be releasing weekly updates with tweeks
and bug fixes. Please look for 1.07a on March 15th.

The volume of traffic on our ftp site (ftp.adeptsoft.com) has been
exceeding our bandwidth... so please look for the latest version
on hobbes.nmsu.edu in the incoming OS2 directory. We will upload
it there first.

If you would like to be on our mailing list, please send email
to [e-mail] with "add me" in the subject.
If you sent in a request previously and were not added, we
apologize. If you have logged onto bbs.adeptsoft.com since
Feb. 20th and gave your email address when asked... you do
not need to send in another request.

                        - - - - - -
Please note: Language.Text has some changes and additions. If you
are running a customized version of Language.Text, please go thru
the default version and update your own!
                        - - - - - -

                     ____NEW POLICY____

As the release of 1.07, AdeptSoft will no longer charge a transfer
fee to transfer a license to another individual. We will only
charge the $50.00 transfer fee to corporate buyers.

As you may have seen in the last 1.06 README.NOW file:
=========================================================================
Announcing the __Wizards of Adept___

Boca Raton, Florida - December 24, 1995

AdeptSoft today announced the formation of The Wizards of Adept,
an independent AdeptXBBS Sysop group led by Julie Strietelmeier,
head of AdeptXBBS Tech Support.

John Morris, Senior VP, Software Engineering continued,
"In a world of FidoNet 'standards' that are seldom 'standard',
the Wizards will also provide an independent point of view
to establish which feature requests are necessary to be added
to AdeptXBBS."

"The Wizards were formed as a way of creating better communication
with AdeptXBBS Sysops. By validating bugs and evaluating FidoNet
feature requests, the Wizards bring a strong Sysop perspective
to decisions that are traditionally left completely to a product's
developers. The result will be a company that is responsive to the
industry needs, not just to the 'squeeky wheels' that shout loudly
when their personal 'feature' is not supported," added John Lawlor,
CEO of AdeptSoft. "The Wizards have been instructed to 'kick us in
the backside' if they feel that we are not listening."

Who are the individual Wizards?
  Julie Strietelmeier- head of AdeptXBBS Tech Support
  Koen Koster  - independent AdeptXBBS Sysop
  Doug Kushner - independent AdeptXBBS Sysop
  Bill Seward  - independent AdeptXBBS Sysop
  Chris Freeze - independent AdeptXBBS Sysop

The Wizard group is closed and there will be no additions in the
forseable future.

The Wizards are paid a commission on new sales-- they are rewarded
for helping to make the product better and more stable.

Why were these people chosen?
Julie Strietelmeier is an active and vocal AdeptXBBS
Sysop in addition to being our head of AdeptXBBS Tech Support.
The other Wizards are long time Sysops and valued Beta testers.
Each has consistantly provided excellent feedback and shown
long term interest that has helped us to improve the product.

How to communicate with the Wizards?

All tech support questions and communications will continue to
be handled by Julie Strietelmeier ([e-mail]).
The other Wizards will continue to participate in the
echos and IRC at their own discretion but will not be
answering questions to tech support. Tech Support questions
will be continue to be answered by Julie.

Julie Strietelmeier emphasized that "The only way to ensure
that a bug gets the treatment that it deserves is to
fill_out_a _bug-report_ completely and e-mail it to
[e-mail].
====================================================================

The Wizards provide excellent support. Seek them out.


Okay, let's list some of the bugs we have worked in the 1.07 release.

Due to some quirks in OS2, AdeptXBBS and its utilities encountered
problems that less multi-threaded programs would never see.  These
problems were generally seen as a sporadic failure of programs to
work, which could not be recreated very easily.  We were bitten by
this problem in several ways. First, the C compiler was doing things
it should not have been doing.  We had to use special debugging
programs to determine that this was the case. We had to write some
of our own C library routines to counter these problems shown by the
C compiler. Next, some items in OS2 work on a 'per process' basis
(in other words, when you run Adept.Exe, it is one process), while
in most of our program we need to deal with things on a per thread
basis (threads are little program units running inside Adept.Exe).
We had to do some more programming to make sure that we tricked
OS2 into thinking we were doing things on the 'process' level,
when we are actually doing it at the 'thread' level. For the most
part, this clears up intermittent failures of Adepts child programs.

NNTP mail has been extensively reworked. It has been under large
test loads for 8 weeks now, and works far better in this release.
This reworking has resulted in incompatibilities between the NNTP
config files with the previous version of adept.
EXISTING NNTP CONFIG FILES NEED TO BE DELETED and new ones built.
Please delete all files in the \Adept\UseNet directory.
We apologize for the inconvience but this change will allow us to
reduce the memory requirements of NNTP in the next release.

The Ring No Answer bug has been found. It was stated somewhere that
this bug was in someone elses software. This was false. The bug was
in AdeptXBBS, it was tracked down and a fix applied.

Offline mail has always been a trouble area. Certain portions
worked correctly, others were lacking sorely. Work has been done
on all 4 types of offline mail that are supported internally by
AdeptXBBS. They include QWK, Bluewave, Plain Text, and Fido Point
mail.   QWK mail and Bluewave mail were further along technologically
than Text, or Fido mail for no apparent reason. All four are
currently at the same level of functionality. You should experience
fewer problems with offline mail in all areas, whether it be
downloading or uploading mail packets.

PMI Indexing has been reworked. Its design is lackluster in the
first place, and did not provide the complete functionality it
should have. The design now should help eliminate problems such
as, when reading messages from a message menu, and the message is
in the PMI index, that record in the PMI index is eliminated so
that the user is not shown a message they have already read. The
same goes for offline mail. If the user downloads a packet with a
message which is listed in the PMI index, that PMI record is
deleted.  PMI indexing should work whether the message is sent
to the users real name or the handle they have chosen.

Chat between nodes was leaking memory in a bad way in 1.06. Even
worse than prior versions. We have changed some basic philosophy
in the chat area, and have made tests of the chat code on various
systems, and the memory leak appears to have been greatly reduced,
if not eliminated.

Picking a offline mail type in the user editor worked in a very
odd fashion. This has been worked on and should reflect the
correct info.

AdeptXBBS would try to kill an Upload test if the user dropped
carrier. This behavior has been changed.

There were some problems in the internet configuration dialog box.
Namely sudden exits of the program if someone really fiddled with
the buttons.

If you make a node inactive. You should now be able to use the com
port on that node.

The user group editor would hose the groups file when saving.

There are many more bugs that have been worked on. Please see how
the program works for you!


                      __________________
Now, here is a small list of bugs that we are aware of, but have not
been able to spend time on, but will do so as time permits:

FTS-0001 sessions have been worked on and are generally usable.
Also, FTS-0007 (sealink xfers) were rechecked to make sure they
follow the fido state tables. Sealink transfers should also work
better. Things to keep in mind, the NO 1K packets option is turned
on by default. Leave it on. 1K packets are not tested.  File
resumption is apparently still not 100%.

File ratios may not be working properly.

Possible problems with XMSG that have been reported, but not in
every case recreated.

Passworded mailer sessions don't always work as planned.

There are many more bugs reported which we will be spending time
on in the near future.

Please note: We will be going to a much quicker release schedule
starting with version 1.07. We will release updates to 1.07 on a
weekly basis. This will start on March 15th, and a release will
occur each Friday. These release will be to 1.07. And will be
numbered like so:  1.07a,  1.07b, etc.  These will contain more
bug fixes, done in a timely manner. If you see a bunch of release,
but you are not experiencing difficulty with your copy of Adept,
you probably will not need any of these extra updates.

                      __________________
Support is available via email to: [e-mail]
or on the #Adept IRC channel. Please check out the adeptsoft
echo, it is available on the support board at: 812-342-6546
or telnet bbs.adeptsoft.com.

Registration Prices are as follows:

2 node AdeptXBBS with REXX                      $   99.00
2 node AdeptXBBS with REXX and Internet         $  159.00
4 node AdeptXBBS with REXX                      $  219.00
4 node AdeptXBBS with REXX and Internet         $  279.00
8 node AdeptXBBS with REXX and Internet         $  449.00
16 node AdeptXBBS with REXX and Internet        $  699.00
32 node AdeptXBBS with REXX and Internet        $ 1199.00
64 node AdeptXBBS with REXX and Internet        $ 1919.00
96 node AdeptXBBS with REXX and Internet        $ 2399.00

Online Registration is available on the Support BBS.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to an exciting year
under AdeptSoft's new management.