In my current .profile, I have my helper flag turned on, and then my
messages turned off. This seems to result in my not being shown as a
helper and in my not being a helper, even though my flag is "on."

help?

(mebbe I should just work around it by setting the help flag after, but
that sounds like something someone intelligent would do, and I can't
have that. :) )

20 responses total.

It's a tad more basic than that...  The message flag takes
priority over the help flgag, i.e. if your messages are turned
off, they're turned off, period.  No requests will come to you,
from help-seekers or anyone.

I see what you mean, carson.  I'd rather be written only by help-seekers
and not by strangers who don't have anything to say to me.  But I usually
am able to quickly get rid of those people by telling them that I'll 
go to party as soon as I want that kind of chat and they should go there now.

Perhaps it would be worth our while to talk to janc about
allowing this in the next version of write?

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I'd certainly try it as well.

I think that's a good idea, even though I have no problem with many more
write than write-help requests.

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I had a script in my .cfonce, for turning on my helper flag when I
run conf, and for turning it off when I quit conf. However the disk
bug ate my .cfonce, and I had not backup. I recall that remmers wrote
it - I'd appreciate it if he, or whoever else knows the script, would
post it here again (I searched here and in info for "turn on", but
it must have been posted in an old info).

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Not in coop (or oldcoop). I guess I'll just have to prevail upon
someone to help me out by giving me the code. Any *helpers* out there?

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The latter. 

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remmers knows - he gave me the script originally. Are you there, remmers?

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I forgot about the help-on, messages-off idea.  I'll put it back into my
things to do queue.

Currently I have "rz" aliased to "amin -n rz" so message permissions are
turned off during z-modems.  If I make the above change, I may need to
extend amin to allow "amin -h n rz".  

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the amin on "rz" is unnecessary.
Many Unix commands of that sort turn off permissions by themselves.
All of that would be broken by the change above, but I suppose we can
assume helpers are sohisticated enough to run anything they care about
under amin.

I know from hard earned experience that rz does *not* turn
off the message flag by itself.  >8(  I've written a simple
script that turns off my flag before starting a download,
and turning it on after.  (Which leads to people asking,
"Why did you turn your flag off???  What's wrong???")

Issues:  Some users look at the "finger" output, see a "?" on janc, then
"write janc".  If I have help on, and messages off, they get "permission
denied."  Not good.

I could make the message say "permission denied...'write help' will be
accepted" which would be weird.  I could have it say "popcorn is only
accepting help requests...Is this a help request?" and wait for a yes/no
answer.  But that is rather gross too.

I could set up "finger" to do something like:

nephi    Michael O'Leary     *?p6        Oct 22 20:47

marking the line with both a * and a ?.  Rather arcane.

I'm not exactly sure how this would all work.

I think diplomatic language can be found to say that "helper" is only
receiving rquests for help issued via 'write help'. Anything is better
than permission denied, when the helper flag is 'up'. 

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