Hello All!

A quick note to advise of the programs status as of 03/03/2020 00:30

Basic testing was completed around 10 days ago but it needed a lot more testing
against more echo's..

So, spent 5 days or so adding a new routines that read the original ELIST.RPT file from Ben dated May 2019 to create individual tagname.ECO files for every one present - that's 165 of them with one rejected - see later.

This evening I finally got around to run them all through the UPDATE cycle and also a REPORT cycle (produces a ELIST.RPT and ELIST.NA - a ELIST.BA process has
not been written yet but is this useful?

If it is then I would create a .BA filebase that would always have the current state of echo that have been deleted from the system in that any newly created Echos via MOD-ADD would see that a matching Echo will be removed from the .BA filebase - So it would always be up to date at any point in time and will be used to create the ELIST.BA report.

Found a few bugs including a few bad addresses within them that Ben's version did not seem to deal with, so the contact information as MOD, FROM etc are some
what bad - for some reason he did not do much in the way of validations so that
data stored is not exactly correct.

Cannot fully confirm this as I do not have his data file.

But did find one echo that has more than the 15 Description lines so my own elist version rejected it - some good news!

It also reported on the bad contact addresses but I have put more testing it to
validate them a bit more - so some more testing.

The program requires that the contact address information supplied via keywords
FROM, MOD (and COMODn) and REPLY-TO conforms to a fixed standard with an optional Email address, in the format of:

Firstname Lastname, netmail address (Zone:Net/Node*){, email address (abcde@whatever.suffix)}.
E.g., Fred Bloggs, 1:234/567, fbloggs27@gmail.com

The email address is totally optional including the leading comma & space.
The netmail address can also include domain and even point, such as: z1:234/56.4@fidonet where the '.4@fidonet' is optional.

For the moment elist does not use emails to receive or send messages or MOD submissions but I will be looking into that once the system is up and running and like wise receiving MOD submissions via netmail.

Note that the first and last name is used for sending echo msgs to ELIST addressed to a MOD submitter. It is also used to send a netmail where both
name and netmail address is required.

Today and tomorrow will be looking at the 4 - 6 new bugs found although I have fixed a few of them today (subject to retest).

The ELIST.RPT look good (apart of these few bugs) and the ELIST.NA look good as well, excluding the blank line at the start which I cannot see in the program but will look at again.

I will send a snippit of these 2 files for you to look at as an additional messages in a few minutes. Please make any comments as to content etc.

You will noticed that the .RPT report provides additional information including
the date last updated and the expiry date.

Hopefully in a day or so I can rerun these MOD-ADD's and post them to ELIST so every can see.



Vince

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