With the advent of Searchlight Software's new QWK/SL, there's been some
discussion of its pros and cons vs. Valence. I decided to make a feature
comparison chart, and include QWKRick and the now-defunct SLQWiK. This
list is by no means complete:

                               Valence   QWK/SL    QWKRick   SLQWiK

Searchlight features:

  Netmail                       Yes       Yes       No        No
  Internet email                Yes       Yes       No        No
  Long subjects (>25 chars.)    Yes       No        No        No
  Included files                Yes       No        No        No
  Translate color codes         Yes       No        No        No
  Metacharacters                Yes       No        No        No
  Underline joining             Yes       No        No        No
  Post with alias               Yes       Yes       No        No
  Language strings              No        Yes       No        Yes
  Edit subboard list            Yes       Yes       No        No
  Over ~1000 subboards          No        Yes       No        No
  Max. lines per message        650       1000      400       400
  Version compatibility         2.15+     4.5+      3.0+      ?

QWK features:

  Control messages              Yes       No        Yes       Yes
  DOOR.ID                       Yes       No        Yes       Yes
  Ordered CONTROL.DAT           Yes       No        No        No
  Pointer files                 Yes       No        No        No
  Bulletins                     Yes       No        No        No
  Welcome/Goodbye screens       Yes       Yes       No        No
  SESSION.TXT                   Yes       No        No        No
  Fido tearline fixing          Yes       No        Yes       Yes
  Translate high-bit chars      Yes       No        No        No
  Archiver choice               Yes       No        No        No
  Use any protocol              Yes       No        No        No
  User control of packet size   Yes       No        No        No
  Personal/to All scanning      Yes       No        No        No
  Multiple packets in one D/L   Yes       No        No        No
  Text packets                  Yes       No        No        Yes

RIP features:

  Mouse support in --
   Subboard list                Yes       Yes       N/A       N/A
   Prompts                      Yes       Yes       No        No
   Options                      No        Yes       Yes       No

  High-resolution display       No        Yes       No        No

Time:

  Secs to scan ~3700 messages   37        85        75        N/A
  Secs to scan and pack         90        165       135       N/A

In the time test, SLQWiK was excluded because it couldn't get through
the scan without locking up. Scanning is the only part of the process
that's really under the control of the QWK program; the packing in each
case was done by PKZIP, at around a minute for each packet. The
resulting packets were about 900k each. The comparison is approximate
because Valence found 3716 messages, while QWK/SL only got 3679. (This
doesn't necessarily mean QWK/SL was skipping messages, though it may.)
All programs were set to a maximum of 500 messages per subboard, 5000
per packet. The test system was a 486dx33 running DOS 5.0 and Hyperdisk.

Versions compared: Valence 1.4x, QWK/SL 1.1, QWKRick 1.01, SLQWiK 1.02d.
(The QWK/SL version number was found only in the FILE_ID.DIZ; I
understand there's a newer version which is supposed to be faster. And I
know there's a later version of SLQWiK, 1.06, but I haven't been able to
find the archive. (If you have it, please email it to me or upload it to
my anonymous FTP site.))
