Newusers and anyone else in need of a little help in using grex, please ask
for it here.  No question too stupid!

113 responses total.

This response has been erased.

hey can u help me buddy this bbs,csh shell is damn difficult

        When a 'radio button' is presented in lynx, how do you change
the button?
        (I think I forgot, and was trying to do it today).

I think you move the cursor onto the button you want to select and press
ENTER.  Or maybe X, or space bar.  I forget which, but it's one of those
three.

It is not X, I think it is Enter.

ok .. where is the file that picospan reads your info from. i know it sure
as hell aint the .plan in my ~. hmm?

you mean for your name?   try the  'change name'  comand.

did that .. didnt work.

see look at my name here, then finger oval.

Then try chfn or !chfn, depending upon your prompt.  I think "change name"
is specific to the current conference.

heh, yeah, chfn will change that.   #6 was asking about picospan info, though

Sorry; I got stuck on the "name" thing.

There are two files:  .cfonce and .cfrc  (I've put mine in ~/.cfdir/).
The first is sourced once per picospan session, the second is sourced
at every conference change.  (Hey! this means I've been running both;
I need to fix that!)

        When you join a new conference (like the new agora) the 
name in .plan is used as the default for the conference.  You
can change your name in each conference after joining.  Changing
your name in .plan will only set a new default for other new
conference joins.

hmm

thanks, i found it - its all makes sense now. :)

Is there some simple way to automatically forget all items started by a
particular user?  (You can guess which one.)

Irony rears its head.  The simplest method is to forget each item
individually, although I suspect that a more expedient method is
the object of inquiry.

You're not just asking for a twit filter, right, Sindi?

Not a question, but a feature request:

I'd like a Backtalk feature to forget a linked item in other 
conferences.  Often, for example, I'll read the financial report in 
Agora, then see it again in Co-op and think "Oh, I should have 
forgotten that in Agora."  It'd be nice if I could click a button that 
would leave the copy I'm reading intact, but forget all linked copies 
in other conferences in my cflist.

I suspect this would be hard to implement, but I thought I'd toss it 
out as an idea.

That would be a useful feature in picospan, too. :)

why does it matter WHICH conference it's forgotten in?

I like to follow grex-management in coop; that's where I'll go to find such
things.  If I've forgotten the 'finance report' item there, I'm not likely
to find it again.  Similarly, I follow the word-games in language not puzzle
and music in music not agora.

It matters _to me_ because of the way _I_ use conferencing.

Weird, but whatever. I follow items wherever I see them, and forget duplicates
based on my cflist. *shrug* diffrent strokes and all that.

I like to forget items in Agora and leave them in other conferences if 
possible.  The reason is I stop reading Agora after two seasons, but 
sometimes items in other conferences lie dormant that long and then get 
activity again.

oh, that *is* a good point

Maybe a twit filter would be appropriate in this case, but I also don't want
to bother reading comments by other people in items entered by this one
person.

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I'd like the feature in #19 as well.  Agora is near the top of my .cflist,
and so I end up seeing the linked version later during a session.  I usually
forget things in Agora rather than in the specialty conferences.

For me it depends on whether I judge the item has "lasting value", or
not. If not, I forget it in the specialty conference.

The hard part is to find where an item is linked to.  There are two defects
in the Picospan conference structure that make this painful to do.  First,
links are done by creating a hard link in the Unix file system.  Inspecting
an item file, it is easy to tell how many links there are to it, but you
can't tell where any of the other ones are.  The only thing to do is
to do a scan of all other conference directories for an item file with the
same inode number.  This is basically like doing an 'ls' of every conference
directory.  Kind of painful.

Except it actually a bit worse than that.  Picospan also lacks a coherent
conference list.  The closest thing is the /bbs/conflist file, but that has
multiple entries for many conferences.  So to generate a conference list so
I can actually do something "for all conferneces", I actually have to first
do a pass through the conflist eliminating duplicates.

So finding the item links is doable, but kind of a pain in the kester. 
Actually forgetting them once found is pretty easy.  In fact, for picospan
users, a tool already exists.  If you want to forget item 78 in the foobar
conference just do

        !forget foobar 78

That's a program that I wrote years ago for exactly this reason.

I'll put it on my list of things to do in Backtalk, but it's not likely to
happen very soon.  I'd like that feature too, but in addition to the technical
difficulties, it is also not obvious how to integrate it into the interface,
and there is the question of how it should handle the case where you are not
a member of the conference it is linked to.   (Should it join the conference
just so you can forget it?  Seems stupid, but not if you later join the
conference.)

The only problem with "!forget agora 78" is that I've no way of remembering
that it is item 78. :(

I wrote something for m-net that would find what links an item had, but it
would run terribly slow on grex.

Re #31:  Sometimes the person linking the item is helpful enough to post a
response saying "Item 63 in the dentalfloss conference linked to item 14 in
the ferrari conference."

(do we actually have a dentalfloss conference?)

(Sure.  Just "join enigma".)

heh.  

Jan, couldn't you use "ls -i" to find the inum of the linked item, then 
use:

   find /bbs -inum <the number> -print

to find the other linked items, and then use that information to forget 
those items?  Is that too CPU intensive?

You could do that, but it'd be awfully resource intensive.  Probably
disk intensive, especially.  The "find" would be doing a global search
over the entire unsorted conference database.

Well, sure, but it would only have to do it if the item was linked, and 
probably further only if someone chose the "forget all links to this 
item" option.  It doesn't seem like it would come up a whole lot.  
Though also it seems like an oversight that Picospan doesn't keep track 
of links in the item file.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss