This program is guranteed to do nothing at all.  By running this program,
you assume all responsibility for any damages caused by it.

Having that out of the way, what this program is SUPPOSED to do is this.
It will accept two command line parameters, one telling the program
where to find your AREAS.BBS file, the other where to find your BBS.CTL
file.  The format of the command line is as follows...

AFHELP -aAREAS.BBS -bBBS.CTL

No spaces are allowed between the -a or -b and their parameter, but a space
is required between the two options.  If either one is not specified, the
program will default to AREAS.BBS and BBS.CTL.  This program will
only look for these files in the current directory.  I have not tested
this by specifying a path.  Might work, might not.

When run, the program will read your AREAS.BBS (or whatever) file and
find all echo areas that are listed.  It will remember the TAG of each,
and the nodes that are fed by this.  Any lines in the AREAS.BBS starting
with a hyphen (-) are ignored (For example MsgPro commands embedded in
the file...) and also the first line is ignored, which is assumed to be
your name and system name.  If you do not include this line in your file,
and have a echo area as your first line, this area will be ignored.  So
you'd be best off to include this info as your first line.  (See sample
file for more info.)

After reading all your echo areas, the program will then read your BBS.CTL
(or whatever) file, and will begin writing out a new BBS.CTL file, which
is called $BBS$.CTL.  You have no choice as to this output name, so
hopefully you will have no other file on your drive by this name...

When the program comes across the line ECHOMAIL in your BBS.CTL, this will
cause the program to look up the following echomail TAG line, and on the
next SCAN line, a new SCAN line will be written in the output file,
containing the node information from the AREAS.BBS file.

The program will then look for the next echomail area to update.

If an echomail area is found in your BBS.CTL file, but is not found in your
AREAS.BBS file, then a message is printed on the screen to that effect.



This program is intended primarily to allow me to run AreaFix on my Opus
1.70 system using the internal message tosser.  If it has any other use,
who knows.  But it was the easiest way for me to accomplish this task.

In your batch file, you will have to manually delete your old BBS.CTL
file and rename the output file $BBS$.CTL to whatever name you want
your .CTL file to be.  Then you will have to SALT your file to recompile
it, and then the new message area info and indexes will be properly
updated.

This program will only be useful until someone writes a routine to update
the message area files and index directly from the AREAS.BBS file, Or
until AreaFix works with Opus 1.70..

The following is how I have my batch file set up...

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

AREAFIX EC
COPY AREAS.BBS C:\BKUP\AREAS.BBS
COPY BBS.CTL C:\BKUP\BBS.CTL
AFHELP
DEL BBS.CTL
REN $BBS$.CTL BBS.CTL
NACL /v BBS.CTL

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

This creates a backup of my files (just in case) and then uses the default
file names for processing.

In your AREAFIX.CTL file, make sure that you have your SystemType set up as
Qmail, not Opus, as follows...

% *-----------------------------------------*
% * Type of EchoMail software.              *
% *-----------------------------------------*
%
% SystemType   ConfMail
  SystemType   QMail
% SystemType   Opus
% SystemType   QuickBBS

This will tell AreaFix to use the AREAS.BBS file to do all its updating,
not the Opus system files.


At this time, this version of AFHELP does not allow for AreaFix creating
new areas as users request them, for example if you would forward a user's
request to turn on a new echo.  So only existing areas can be updated,
and if you are going to allow forwarding of requests you will have to
set up the new area yourself in the BBS.CTL file, and AREAS.BBS.  The next
verion of AFHELP (if there is another version) MIGHT have this feature...

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

Any problems should be reported to Jim Wright at 1:2250/4.  Include as
much information as possible, the command line used, what (if anything)
was garbled, etc...
