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Cream of the Crop 21
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Cream of the Crop 21 (Terry Blount) (October 1996).iso
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HOWTO.TXT
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1996-08-19
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20KB
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384 lines
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TV Agent -- HOW TO FOR SYSOPS 8/19/96
1. Receiving TVLIST*.*
2. $2 credit for distributing TV listings
3. Distributing TVLIST*.*
4. TV Agent Demo
5. Your personal use of TV Agent
1. Receiving TVLIST*.*
TV listings for use with TV Agent are sent every day in the Planet
Connect datastream. Before the first transmission of the Fido mail,
and before the Fido mail repeats, three files TVLIST??.ARC are
transmitted. Sometimes the Fido mail is repeated a third time, and in
that case it is preceded by eight TVLIST??.ARC files, which is the
set for the whole current week.
The TVLIST*.* land in the directory you have specified in the line in
RULEBASE.CFG with grp 7. By default that line is
:rulebase, *, 7, *, *, *, *, disk, C:\TV/, *
^^^^^
You can change the path to another drive and directory (keep the
trailing "/".)
If you use TV Agent yourself AND you pass the datafiles on to others
you will want to change rulebase grp 7 to routinely send the data
files to a different directory. C:\TV is the default directory where
your personal copy of TVAGENT.EXE was installed when you installed
your Planet Connect software, and you do NOT want TVAGENT.EXE to run
in the directory with your only copy of TVLIST*.* before you have
distributed the TVLIST*.*.
Two of the new TVLIST??.* files you get each morning are listings
files, where the ?? shows the day of the month. One file is for
tomorrow ("fresh" listings, containing changes the programmer
announced yesterday) and one is for 6 days later ("advance" listings.)
If today is the 9th, the file containing freshly updated listings for
tomorrow will be called TVLIST10.ARC. The other file contains
"advance" listings for the day one week from today, TVLIST16.ARC. On
the 15th you will get a slightly larger, fresher TVLIST16.ARC, and the
advance TVLIST22.ARC. The filenames are reused, so if you never delete
them your directory will soon have 31 files, TVLIST01.ARC thru
TVLIST31.ARC, consuming about 9 megabytes.
The small TVLISTTK.ARC file sent each day can be unzipped to find two
TIC files, for instance TV960710.TIC and TV960716.TIC, which match the
two new listings files sent that day. The TIC parameter "Replaces"
appears in some of the TIC files to eliminate obsolete listings files
-- for instance the TIC for the advance TVLIST07.ARC will say
"Replaces TVLIST29.ARC" because by the time you have received advance
listings for the 7th, the file for the 29th is definitely obsolete.
The "Replaces" parameter is not used to delete listings for the first
8 days of the month because those can be used with the TV Agent demo
on any day.
If you didn't get the TVLIST*.* due to errors or your local problem,
you can freq them from 1:3615/50 or ftp from ftp.planetc.com. If there
was a problem getting the TV listings uplinked on time, the files may
already be available at Planet Connect. If you have not received one
of the expected TVLIST*.* files by the time the PCUSENET downlink
starts, you may not want to wait for the next repeat -- go ahead and
freq or ftp them. The filedate should be today, for the two files you
expected to get today. TV Agent works best when users look at FRESH
listings for tomorrow, so users will appreciate it if you replace the
advance listings with the fresh listings which have the same file name
as soon as possible.
2. ------- $2 Credit for Planet Connect sites supplying TVLIST*.ARC
When a TV Agent subscriber identifies a Planet Connect site as his
source for TVLIST*.* files, that Planet Connect site gets a $2 credit
on their next PC renewal. The PC site gets another $2 credit when the
TV Agent subscription is renewed. There is no limit on the credit
available; if you supply listings to enough TV Agent subscribers to
more than pay for your Planet Connect subscription, Planet Systems
will pay YOU at your renewal time. The PC site gets the credit even if
the user gets the listings from another BBS which ultimately got the
listings from the PC site.
Make sure your TV Agent users know they should identify your PC site
when they subscribe to TV Agent so Planet Systems can direct the
credit to the right place. If they don't mention any PC site, you can
still get the credit by calling me and claiming them by name. Also
call me if you'd like to check the status of your credits and which
subscribers have said they get listings from you.
If you're hubbing the listings thru other BBSs the end users may not
know who you are, but you can announce yourself and tell them who
supplies their listings by inserting a notice into the listings. Write
an ASCII file called "ANNOUNCE.TXT", with a maximum line length of 74.
The first line will be used as a heading. The file could be up to 32K
long but I hope you don't have that much to say. Then insert it into
a TVLIST*.* occasionally. First check that the listing file does not
already contain an ANNOUNCE.TXT; I put one in when channels change
names or locations etc and you don't want to mess up one of my rare
announcements.
PKUNZIP -t TVLIST17.ARC
will tell you if there already is an ANNOUNCE.TXT in TVLIST17.
Actually you better check each one of the current listings, because if
the TVLISTdd.ARC where I put an ANNOUNCE.TXT gets unzipped BEFORE the
TVLISTdd.ARC where you put one, my announcement gets overwritten.
PKZIP TVLIST17.ARC ANNOUNCE.TXT will insert your announcement.
Don't do it often enough to annoy your callers; the presence of an
announcement prevents their TV Agent from immediately jumping to the
current listings. They will have to see the first ~20 lines on any day
they decompress a TVLIST*.* that contained an ANNOUNCE.TXT. They can
then read the whole thing, or print it; then it is automatically
deleted. Of course you screw up the TIC CRC when you insert a file.
3. --------------- Distributing TVLIST*.*
Planet Connect sites and others can distribute the TVLIST*.ARC files
for use with TV Agent to callers or to other BBSs. A FILE_ID.DIZ is
included in each TVLIST*.ARC which identifies the day the listings are
for and whether the listings are fresh or advance. It also includes a
short description of TV Agent and tells how to subscribe.
The extension .ARC is still used, for irrelevant historical reasons.
If you find the extension is confusing you can rename them
TVLIST??.ZIP. TV Agent users are not supposed to unzip them, and any
file extension besides ZIP might help prevent complaints from users
who try to unzip them. Renaming them TVLIST??.AGT might be less
confusing. TVAGENT.EXE will PKUNZIP TVLIST*.* so it does not care
what extension you use. However, the .TIC files that are zipped into
TVLISTTK.ARC refer to the .ARC extension, so if you rename them do it
after you're thru with the TICs.
TV Agent subscribers will probably call you EVERY DAY and download a 290k
file. They need to have those fresh listings for tomorrow to take best
advantage of TV Agent. If they don't mind missing a few changes in
schedule and additional episode details, they may use the advance
listings instead (those are still fresher than weekly paper guides which
have to be printed and mailed.)
Any time they call (after you've received the TVLIST*.* in the Planet
Connect datastream) they can download fresh listings for today and
tomorrow and advance listings for the next six days. Some callers may
call only once a week and download fresh listings for the next day,
and advance listings for the rest of the week.
People who take their TV listings seriously will probably call you
daily and download TWO files, the same two TVLIST*.* that you got from
satellite. That way if they don't connect one day, they will still
have the advance listings for the fresh day they missed.
This last strategy is supported by a door program written by Pab
Sungenis. If you want to use it, freq TVDOOR.ZIP from him at 1:266/73
or from Planet Connect 1:3615/50. Or, se