ProfitPress Mega CDROM2 …eeware (MSDOS)(1992)(Eng)/ProfitPress-MegaCDROM2.B6I/BBS/RA/RABEST40.ZIP/RABEST.DOC

Text File | 1990-03-22 | 11.1 KB | 234 lines

         RABEST USERS STATISTICS SCREENS GENERATOR (Ver 4.0)
        ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
                For Remote Access BBS Systems Only

                 Written by Colin Berg  (c)1990
                     Fido : 3:635/501


RABEST is guaranteed to do absolutely nothing.  If it trashes your
Hard Disk or Makes Love to your CPU then that is your problem.
It works fine on my AT Clone and that is about all I can tell you.
Because of this RABEST is totally free for all to use (Note: Except
in a Commercial Environment) at absolutely no cost to you.  All I
ask is that if you use RABEST on a regular basis PLEASE make a
small donation to one of the Cancer Research Foundations in your area.

Note: Commercial users are asked to make a minimum donation of
      $25.00 to a Cancer Research Foundation in their country on
      behalf of the Author of this Program.

NOTE: RABEST WILL NOT WORK WITH QUICKBBS SYSTEMS.

RABEST is a simple little program which does nothing more than to
create Best Users Screens for Remote Access BBS Systems.
It will create 12 Screens (6 * ???.ANS) & (6 * ???.ASC) which list
the Top ?? number of Users on your system in the following categories.

Best Uploaders by No: of Kilobytes Uploaded       = BestupK.???
Best Uploaders by No: of Files Uploaded           = BestupF.???
Worst Downloaders by No: of Kilobytes Downloaded  = BestdwnK.???
Worst Downloaders by No: of Files Downloaded      = BestdwnF.???
Best Message Writters by No: of Messages Posted   = BestPost.???
Best Callers to Your System by No: of Calls Made  = BestCall.???

RABEST is a bit of a memory hog and you will need aprox' 200K of Mem
to process a 500 Record Users.bbs file.  RABEST will handle a Users.bbs
file with up to 2000 records in it.
Although it is a memory hog RABEST is fairly fast, it completes it's
task in around 8 - 10 seconds (at default values) on my 12mhz AT clone.


TAKE NOTE:  **********************************************************

RABEST Requires the following Files to Operate.

CONFIG.RA  RABEST now takes most of it's params from here.
USERS.BBS  This is where the info comes from.
**********************************************************************

RABEST also places an Ansi or Asci Clearscreen command at the start of
each screen depending on whether it is an ASC or ANS screen being created.
(* Version 1.1 had page pausing turned off at the start of each screen.
   This is no longer included so that the new MAX SIZE function can work. *)

RABEST is partially configurable from the command line and also from
an OPTIONAL file called RABEST.XCL.

Place the following command into your batchfile to run during your nightly
BBS maintenance.

RABEST <Max Size of Screens (OPTIONAL)>

Thats all you need to tell RABEST.  All other parameters are taken from
the Config.Ra file.

The MAX SIZE of Screens is the amount of users you wish to be displayed
in each screen that RABEST creates.  You may place a number anywhere
between 1 & 100 in this location and that will be the amount of users
placed into each screen.  If you do not use this option RABEST will
default to a size of 12 Users ( 23 Lines CGA ).  If you use a number
which is larger than the size of your Users.bbs File RABEST will default
to the size of the users.bbs Minus the people listed in the RABEST.XCL.
This allows you to create a Top 100 Users Listing.

Sample Batchfile Command

RABEST 50
 ^      ^
 |      | Number of users to be displayed (*OPTIONAL Defaults to 12*).
 |
 | Main Program Name.


NOTE: You do not need to Include the Sysops Name in RABEST.XCL.
      RABEST will grab this info from Config.RA.

You may also create an OPTIONAL file called RABEST.XCL which will allow
you to exclude up to 100 Names (35 Chars Long) from the Screens that
RABEST creates.
The format of this file is simple.  It is 1 name per line and up to 100
names in the file (Flat Asci Text).
The RABEST.XCL file MUST be placed in the same dir as RABEST.EXE.


RABEST was tested on my MicroScience AT 12mhz Clone with AMI Bios, and
everything has been running smothly.
RABEST was written in and compiled with Turbo Pascal 5.5, and thanks also
go to the Writers of the TechnoJocks Turbo Tool Kit which has helped make
my coding easier in this and several other projects I have been working on.

If you have any Comments or Bug Reports please send me a message to the
following address.

Colin Berg   FidoNet 3:635/501.


RABEST has become more popular than I ever expected.  Too all those who
have been making the LD Calls from Zones 1 & 2, I hope RABEST has lived
up to your expectations.

Regards,
          Colin Berg ..  The Wastelands .. Fido 3:635/501



IBM           : (C) International Business Machines.
Remote Access : (C) Continental Software.
Quickbbs      : (C) The Quickbbs Group Inc.
Turbo Pascal  : (C) Borland.

Thanks go to the following who tested the first few versions for me...
Lincoln Broomhall    ..  The Madhouse BBS
John Marsden         ..  The Little Shop of Horrors BBS
Ian Mason            ..  The Thunderdome BBS
Andrew Milner        ..  Remote Access OZ Support


VERSION INFO

V0.1  Did nothing more than create an Asci Screen to display the best
      callers to my system.

V1.0  Major upgrade.  RABEST was rewritten to create all 6 ansi sceens.

V1.1  RABEST rewritten to create both Asc & Ans screens & Clearscreen
      codes added, Page Pausing (OFF) code added.

V1.2  RABEST rewritten to allow the RABEST.XCL file.

V2.0  Major upgrade. RABEST code made smaller, Read/Sort routines sped up,
      MAX SIZE Option included, Screens redesigned, more error handling
      included.  The page pausing (OFF) control char was removed from the
      screens to allow for the larger screens created due to the Max Size
      option.

V2.1  Minor Fixes to speed up the ansi displays.  Screens now display about
      twice as fast as in V2.0.

V2.5  Some major recoding done in this version.  All Records are now
      allocated to pointers, there is not an array in sight.
      Slightly faster now when run using the default screen size of 12 users.
      Because of the better memory management I have been able to increase
      some of the maximum values.
      The MAX SIZE command line Option can now be set anywhere between 1 & 100
      users (Still defaults to 12 if not specified on Command Line).
      This now allows you to create a Top 100 Users list for each category.
      If you have a small user base (Less than 100 Users) and accidently set
      Max Size to it's full value RABEST will default to the Max Number of
      Records in your users.bbs ( Minus Names in RABEST.XCL ).
      The amount of Names listed in the RABEST.XCL File can now be raised to
      100 to allow you to remove the names of people who may have special
      priv's on your system.
      ALL un-needed Ansi codes have been stripped and Ansi screens now display
      nearly as fast as a standard Remote Access Menu Screen.
      RABEST Takes around 8 Seconds to do its job at the 12 user default size
      and only 14 seconds when run at its maximum values of 100.
      Doc's rewritten to show changes.

V3.0  Will it ever stop???? MAJOR REWRITE... First Non-Beta Release..
      What a day!! RABEST now makes use of the CONFIG.RA file to get hold
      of a lot of it's parameters. The only thing you need enter on the
      command line is the amount of people you want RABEST to list in it's
      output files and even that is still optional.
      The RA Config file is now used to find the path to your System Dir,
      Path to your Text Files Dir, Path and Name of your RA.Log, the Name
      of your BBS, and the Sysops Name.
      RABEST now places the BBS Name & Sysops Name in each Screen.
      You no longer need to include the Sysops name in RABEST.XCL.
      You no longer need to tell RABEST where the Text File Dir is.
      RABEST now Logs what it did to your RA.LOG (path and name taken from
      Config.RA).  If no Config.RA or Ra.Log exists RABEST will write an
      Error Message to a File called RABEST.ERR and Abort without doing any
      further operations.
      All Error Messages are Logged to one of these files and are no longer
      output to the screen.  This gives you a chance to find out what is wrong
      if you cant get RABEST working for some reason.
      All RABEST's sort routines have been sped up considerably, and even with
      the extra logging that is going on it still runs within about 2 seconds
      of the earlier versions.
      Did a few other things to the code, but I cant be stuffed writting any
      more.  I have covered all the major changes, the other stuff was only
      cosmetic.
      Renamed ARCHIVE & EXECUTABLES to RABEST.??? (more appropriate).
      Files were origionally called Bestof now called RABEST.???

V3.1  Some small changes made at the prompting of John Marsden.
      RABEST now does a secondary sort to make sure that if you have more than
      one user on the same amount of stat's that those users are then
      re-sorted into the highest user number down.  This is a cosmetic change
      and it adds about 2 to 3 seconds to the overall runtime of RABEST, but
      at least users will now appear in a more logical order.
      Fixed a problem with the search for the Users.bbs file, I was looking
      in the System Dir for it, Now it does the right thing and looks in the
      MsgBase Dir.

V3.2  Changed the way RABEST does it's logging.  It used to abort if it
      could not locate a Remote Access System log, but now rather than abort
      RABEST will create it's own log RABEST.LOG.
      Because of this there is no longer a need for RABEST.ERR so that has
      been removed.

V3.3  Not much done here really, Wrote my own Date/Time routines to fix the
      logging so that it looks a lot more like the Frontdoor and Opus Logging
      Styles.  Now your log files should remain nice and neat.

V4.0  Some major work done here.  Code is slightly smaller even though I have
      RABEST doing more work than before (It should also run a little faster).
      At the request of a few people RABEST no longer uses IBM graphics chars
      when it creates the .ASC screens, it uses "* - |" instead for these.
      User Numbers are now fixed so that they are consistant with the users
      location in the Users.bbs.
      RABEST now searches the Dos Environment path to try and find CONFIG.RA.
      This means that RABEST can now be run from any directory as it first
      looks in the current dir for Config.Ra and if not found will then search
      the Env Dos Paths.
      As long as Config.Ra is somewhere in that path RABEST will perform
      normally, as all other parameters are taken from that file.
      The problem with RABEST not creating the correct log type has been
      fixed.  This was due to some changes that Andrew Milner (Remote Access)
      made to the structures of V0.2 of RA, but when he did it he forgot to
      update the structures doc to let us util writters in on the secrets.