
BAJA PROGRAMMING



          * Symbolist's Sysop Journal, 1 December 1994 *

                 __True "Rooms" for Synchronet__
                                or
            "How I go schizo from 10 p.m. 'til 2 a.m.
             (and we're both still fine, thank you.)"

                            **********

I worked for a long time to find a way to have discrete "rooms" or
"forums" on my Synchronet BBS, COMM*Net. In general, I like the form of
Compuserve's forums in that I can go into a topic-driven area and find
*everything* on that topic. And while BBSes in general allow this in
separate message areas and file areas, etc..., as a new user I found
this cumbersome and confusing. Plus, in my view, an online environment
needs to approximate understandable models for as broad a user-mind
base as needed. So - I wanted rooms.

Now, I know that many sysops and some power users won't like rooms. They
like speed and know how to get it out of the boards they use. However,
this "room" concept is priceless for many uses, plus, I'm stubborn and
used to think that I have a quick learning curve, and getting "rooms"
was stuck in my head (most of you know *that* feeling). I had to solve
it.

I am not a programmer, which will be abundantly obvious to any better
skilled person than I, and I'm sure many others could have (and may
now) seen this as a silly, easy problem. But there sure are a lot of
sysops (a couple are successful programmers too) who haven't done it,
and I was getting nowhere asking for help. So I plugged ahead...

[It's easy to spot me in a crowd. I'm the one with the brick-patterned
imprint on my forehead.]

                             -------------

                             Rooms Defined

        I define a room as a BBS area that can have every capability of
        the BBS itself, but may also have very limited capabilities;
        message areas, file areas, chat, text files, bulletins, and
        any doors or other external services I want.

        This doesn't sound too unique except that none of the room
        contents can be visible or scan-able from outside the room in
        the main board, and vice-versa. That means it is isolated
        totally and users in the room can do a new_scan_all and NOT have
        the rest of the board scanned too. And, users outside the room
        can't see or access any of the room's functions.

        Plus, to be the best modification, it needs to be integral to
        SBBS and not have the lags and clumsiness I associate with
        doors and some other external applications I've seen.


                     The Benefits I Want From Rooms

        1. If I want to run a totally separate BBS for a certain
        function, user group, or whatever, I want to do that from INSIDE
        my existing command shell, without running separate instances of
        some other BBS as a door. It should be able to have EVERY SBBS
        function within itself without interacting with the MAIN board.

          That means that users can go into the Real Estate Online room
          and have message groups, file Libraries, chat channels, text
          files, doors, and anything else that they want and won't get
          any place else on the board. The Real Estate Club (or
          whatever) can meet in privacy, even have membership access,
          configured in baja.

        2. The rooms can be either public or private.

        3. A room may only have a message base, or file area, or door,
        and not need the full BBS shell to function.

        4. It should have it's on ascii/ansi/rip "Welcome to the
        blah-blah club", and "Thank You for Visiting the blah-blah
        Clubhouse, come again soon!" login and logout screens.

        5. It should have its own unique menus and be able to function
        completely differently than the BBS if that's what I want.

        6. It should not stop offline reader users from their QWK
        functions.

