Grex Info Conference

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Grex Info Item 150: Marker for responses already read
Entered by wh on Wed May 25 20:27:09 UTC 1994:

How does grex keep track of what responses within an item that
we have read? I was out of town for most of March and have
300 responses (arrrggghh!) to catch up on in the literary item
in agora. How can go into the shell and move the marker down
when I read 20 responses?

11 responses total.

#1 of 11 by remmers on Wed May 25 21:43:01 1994:

What I'd do under those circumstances is join agora, at the "Ok"
prompt type "fix 5" (5 is the number of that item, I believe).  This
makes Picospan mark the whole item as "read".

If you then type "read new 5", you'll be put at the "Respond or pass"
prompt for the item.  You can then tail back by entering negative
numbers (for example, -10 to read the last 10 responses), and
determine what part of the item is currently relevant.

#2 of 11 by wh on Wed May 25 22:59:34 1994:

Thanks. That certainly solves part of my problem--keeping up with
current responses. What I really need is two bookmarks, one for
current responses, and one for past unread responses. I don't think
we have anything that does that.

When I look in my .cfagora9.cf file, I see 500 on 3 which might
mean I have read 500 lines (or other units) of item 3. If I play
around with that number, i.e. change it to 600, may I assume that
I will not mess up a)other parts of grex   b)other parts of my
home directory   and c)other parts of my .agora9.cf?

#3 of 11 by davel on Thu May 26 00:42:17 1994:

I think you're probably safe on those three things.  I'd suggest that you
*not* do it while you're in the bbs in agora, though.

#4 of 11 by wh on Thu May 26 02:11:37 1994:

I changed the number of lines from 519 to 419. It did not seem
to change anything when I went back into Agora and r new.
I guess that's not the only controlling item.

#5 of 11 by popcorn on Thu May 26 02:24:59 1994:

This response has been erased.

#6 of 11 by mdw on Thu May 26 02:39:08 1994:

When you join a cf, picoSpan reads the participation file,
and when you leave the cf, participation writes out a new
copy based on what's stored in its memory.  If you change
the file when PicoSpan is in that cf, any changes you
make will be ignored and wiped out when you leave,
replaced by what PicoSpan had stored in core.  There
are, however, 3 commands you can use that will modify
this:
        c load   - that causes PicoSpan to load a new
                copy of the participation file over whatever's
                in memory
        c save  -that explicitely flushes what PicoSpan has
                stored in memory.
        d seen  -this shows PicoSpan's current notion of
                what you've seen,e tc.  There is
                more information here than what's stored
                in the file, because it also includes
                informatino read in from the conference
                summary file.
There are other comands that relate to this as well,
especially:
        c autosave      -causes PicoSpan to save the
                participation file more often
        abort   -causes PicoSpan to exit without
                writing the participaotiation file.

Format of the file:
        line 1 '!<pr03>'
        line 2 - your name as it will be signed on
                any responses yiou make in this cf.
        line 3 + - one per item in the cf:
                        item#, # responses seen, timestamp.
                timestamp is the # of seconds since 1970, in hexadecimal.
If you botch the file, you cann't break PicoSpan or
other users.  you will only wipe out the seen information
for yourself in that cf.  If you make a backup copy of
the file before you munge it, you can recovery -or,
you can use "fix" instead.  If you kept 2 copies
of the file, you could use one to catch up on past
responses, & the 2nd to keep up with current activity.
You'd hae to wkr out a way to synchronise the two &
where to store the one that's not in use - PicoSpan
won't help you there.

#7 of 11 by cicero on Thu May 26 06:24:23 1994:

When I got really behind once I avoided this mess entirely by typing
define pager cat, then opening my capture buffer and just letting
all the messages scroll in.  Then I read and responded off-line.
I figured anything that I'd have to say would be so out of date, that an
extra day wouldn't matter.

#8 of 11 by davel on Thu May 26 12:59:36 1994:

Re #6: Marcus, what is the #-responses-seen field actually *used* for?
(I guess what I'm asking is this: in some fairly inactive conferences
I've started out by running FIX ALL, then browsing to see what I'm
really interested in.  But the result seems to be that when anyone
enters a new response in an item I haven't read I suddenly get the entire
item.  (This has also happened when my .cf file got trashed because of
lack of disk space.)  Is it using the timestamp to determine whether there
are new responses at all, & then using the #items to see where to start?
This is sometimes a problem.)

#9 of 11 by popcorn on Thu May 26 22:54:33 1994:

This response has been erased.

#10 of 11 by bubbles on Thu May 26 23:40:51 1994:

When I've looked at my .whatever.cf files I think I see the item number,
then the number of the last response I've seen, then something that could
be a Unix timestamp in hex.  Could it be comparing the timestamp with the
topic timestamp in the conf to see if something hew has been posted, then
using the other number to count X number of responses from the beginning?

#11 of 11 by mdw on Thu Jun 30 08:37:08 1994:

Yes, that's what PicoSpan does.  "fix all" should set the # of responses
to the number of responses present in each file - it should be exactly
the same in effect as if you had said:
        read pass all >/dev/null

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