stever@tree.UUCP (Steve Rudek) (11/03/88)
This system supports a "tree structured," publicly-available BBS which is being modified to support USENET. Considering that the BBS evolved compeletely independent of any knowledge of how USENET implemented and maintained its message base, the conversion is proceeding very nicely. The BBS directories map directly to the USENET directories (after being perverted by the "link" command) and our users can now read USENET. In fact, since the BBS and USENET independently arrived at the same file naming "trick" (place each message in a separate, "integer-named" file) "posting" messages from the BBS into the USENET message directories was also easy to implement. However, while the bnews software is smart enough to recognize the existence of BBS messages and skip over them when deciding on a name-number for a new USENET message it completely ignores them when it comes to reading BBS messages (via readnews or vnews) and using "sendbatch" to transfer messages to other system. That, as far as we are concerned, is a *feature*; we don't want just any drop-by guest to be able to post to the net (I've heard the stories of "portal"). However, we would like to allow *validated* users to post messages through the bbs into USENET. What is the minimum required in order for the USENET software to fully recognize BBS messages? Proper message headers must be one important aspect of a solution. (1) What is a required minimum subset for a message header? (2) What other file updates might be required for usenet/bnews compatibility? Is it necessary to turn the posting process over to inews? (3) We want to write a message reader--roughly modeled after vnews--which will strip extraneous header information from USENET messages. The vnews code appears just a wee bit too hairy (and undocumented) for me to decipher its function easily. So, I've decided to write a "less-like" reader with header stripping capability. Does anyone know what header lines to strip, which to support on out-going messages, etc? If anyone already has a routine to deal with message headers I'd appreciate a copy. (4) Allowing BBS "guests" to post USENET messages is going to create a problem with the rest of the net being able to uniquely identify the poster on this system. All "guests" share the same "guest" account; we don't want to clutter up the system password file with the names of transients. What header lines are required to support mail responses, etc. IS THERE ANY WAY THAT A UNIQUE IDENTIFIER MIGHT BE SLIPPED INTO THE ADRESS LINE WHICH WOULD ALLOW A CUSTOM MAIL PROGRAM TO REROUTE GUEST MESSAGES to a specific guest user? I've seen lots of weird addressing schemes incorportating "@" and "." symbols (e.g. cmu.edu.whatever) but I don't want to have to experiment to discover a special symbol which would be innocuous in an address header. Any answers would be appreciated. Reading through all the bnews source in search of answers just doesn't seem very appealing.