Getting in Front of Fronttalk - Following news on multiple conferences

Sep 22 09:09 UTC 2018

Getting in Front of Fronttalk


Fronttalk is a shell-based interface for the Backtalk on-line forum
system. This document is a brief tutorial on how to use Fronttalk on
Grex to track activity on multiple conferences.

1. Preliminaries

A good introduction to basic Frontalk usage can be found in the item
"Guide to PicoSpan" on the Intro conference. Note that many commands may
be abbreviated, such as "r" for READ, "br" for BROWSE, ....

There is a bug in Backtalk/Fronttalk which prevents users from using
both Fronttalk and Backtalk in logged-in mode, preventing Backtalk from
tracking your history of previously read posts and causing Fronttalk to
crash. (It is possible to use both Fronttalk and Backtalk in anonymous
mode.) If you are experiencing this problem, steps to correct it are
described in response #17 to item "Backtalk Crash" on the Garage
forum. Unfortunately, you much choose between Fronttalk or logging-in to
Backtalk on the Web.

2. Hotlist

In order to efficiently track multiple conferences in Fronttalk it is
necessary to create a hotlist, which is a plain text file consisting of
a list of conference names that you wish to follow.

Your hotlist is stored in the file ~/.cfdir/.cflist . You can edit it
inside Fronttalk with the command SET LIST, but you can also edit it
with the editor of your choice from your shell account.

You can build your hotlist from scratch, or you can start from a list of
all conferences by copying the file ~papa/share/cf/cflist to your
hotlist file.

You can put your hotlist conferences in any order. It is recommended
that you put the conferences in which you are most interested at the
top.

3. Following the news

After starting Fronttalk (shell command "bbs"), read items and responses
in your current conference as normal with commands READ ("r"), BROWSE
("br"), etc.

When you want to check other conferences for new items and responses,
enter the command NEXT ("n") at the Ok: prompt. Fronttalk will scan your
hotlist conferences in order until it finds one with new activity, then
automatically join you to that conference and return you to the Ok:
prompt so that you can read at your leisure.

When you want to check for another active conference, enter the NEXT
command again at the Ok: prompt.

You do not have to read all of the new content in a conference before
you move on to other conferences. In fact, the Fronttalk READ NEW
command is designed to list only a limited number of new items per
session for conferences for which you have a large backlog of unseen
content so that new users can dip into the historic depths of Backtalk
bit by bit.

4. Fixing markers

Occassionally, your already seen markers will get out of synchronization
and NEXT will take you to a conference reporting new items or responses,
but READ NEW will report no new content. You can fix this problem by
entering the command FIXSEEN at the Ok: prompt.