Quite honestly, i have a galaxy s9 and a galaxy 21 something and citadel as it curls up from the current build IS ALREADY displayed nicely on my android devices.

Mon Jun 07 2021 12:08:25 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

What does "responsive" mean in this context? 

 

Sun Jun 06 2021 14:47:41 EDT from Nurb432

If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming. 

Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.  

 

 

Thank you. :) 

Mon Jun 07 2021 13:07:45 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

It's a buzzword that means the site automatically adjusts its layout to look good on any size device. Some people use it to mean other things.

What does "responsive" mean in this context? 

Sun Jun 06 2021 14:47:41 EDT from Nurb432

If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming. 

Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.  

 

I think the SourceForge was abandoned a long time ago as kind of a different direction and approach than Citadel takes. 

I *like* this about Citadel. It has always stood apart from the "expected norms" of technology - and it still does today. Back during the start, it was "Menu Driven BBS formats". 

"I can't undertstand Citadel, it is too difficult and confusing. Why doesn't it have a menu driven interface like every other BBS. That is why Citadel sucks and I don't use it!" 

"That isn't a problem... it is a FEATURE..." 

:) 

Mon Jun 07 2021 02:34:43 EDT from smashbot64

and the last commit was 2007. come on.

 

and the last commit was 2007. come on.

I don't know IG's position on the future of this software package, but here are my thoughts. 

Many inferior software "suites" that perform (largely at a lesser scale or stability level) are available for purchase. The proprietary ones have a company behind them that rhymes with Noracle, (well ok so F it, its Oracle). Citadel is GNU GPL released, so that means that ANYONE READING THIS is free to fork it to their own tune. 

This is where, I think, we recon with the age old concept of "Caveat Emptor".

My ruby on rails and PHP and C++ and VB skills are all in the same boat: I know how, but I am what Commodore BBS sysops have and still called "domesticated". (wife2.0/exwife/kids/dog/bills). This means, I can not reasonably stay up all night, consuming a whole sleeve of Coca Cola throughout the night to bang out the next release. (I am talking commodore, I never had a citadel release). These days, it might look like burning through a 30 pack but that's another story.

What I have noticed is that making change happen for citadel, adding features, making citadel do more things, requires development for conjoined twins. If I want citadel to perform a function it currently does not,  I have to make sure it flows as equally as possible and is as functionally accurate as possible between webcit and textcit. Webcit is pretty much javascript, html and xml. But- I cut my teeth on text, so naturally, webcit needs to work nicely with textcit. THIS IS HARD. Lots of peeps could just add shit to webcit, but then the whole reason citadel is what it is- a bbs with a web face, gets lost.

I may be in the dark, or maybe I have been gone so long from activity that I missed if this has already happened but, 

I propose directing more interest to the current incarnation of citadel to its sourceforge presence.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/citadel

Others might be attracted to the code, and contribute.

Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

But I do agree, the high contrast theme of Smashbot is easier on my old eyes and I find it easier to find the buttons. 

I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it. I know you can point a mail client at it, and I guess that would get something like the same result - but a mobile app or mobile web version would be awesome. 

Some of these things, I've discussed with Ig in the past - and his argument - and I can see it - is that he doesn't want to add the same kind of vapid features that are present in most mainstream social media sites, like "like" buttons - or that the way that Citadel handles message stores and what not makes it difficult or impossible to implement some of these features without rewriting all of the core logic. 

 

 

I'm pretty patient. Ig is doing awesome stuff with Citadel right now - and I feel like there is a renewed interest in running small sites that are an alternative to big Social Media - and Citadel is really the best game in town for that, right now. 

Sun Jun 06 2021 14:47:41 EDT from Nurb432

If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming. 

Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.  

 

If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming. 

Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.  

But I do agree, the high contrast theme of Smashbot is easier on my old eyes and I find it easier to find the buttons. 

I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it. I know you can point a mail client at it, and I guess that would get something like the same result - but a mobile app or mobile web version would be awesome. 

Some of these things, I've discussed with Ig in the past - and his argument - and I can see it - is that he doesn't want to add the same kind of vapid features that are present in most mainstream social media sites, like "like" buttons - or that the way that Citadel handles message stores and what not makes it difficult or impossible to implement some of these features without rewriting all of the core logic. 

You had me at point 4. 

�😂

Sun Jun 06 2021 05:10:58 EDT from smashbot64

 

4. I am pretty drunk while entering this post, not unlike most of my 4 am rants. I may have lost the original thought behind what I was trying to convey. 

 

Thanks PD, Glad you liked it. TBH, my motivation to change what I did was somewhat self-serving. I have not changed the structure of the stylesheets (/usr/local/webcit/static/styles) as of yet, but it's on The List(1). My reasoning behind what I have done so far kind of follows this meandering path:

1. Anyone with skills akin to reading a recipe in a cookbook can spin up their own citadel. For the SysOp's investment of $0 to license the software, an enterprise-grade package is merely just a download away. The documentation is included. This is a far cry from when I first started running BBS systems (citadel-128 in cp/m mode of a commodore 128) and to get working usable BBS software, I had to spend my teenage hard-earned money (Blockbuster Video clerk). $100 might as well have been a million dollars back then. 

2. Like the proliferation of Color 64, Image, C-Net, Wildcat, WWIV, and well... name any BBS package ad nauseam, these packages were merely transports. The real value of any BBS is the original ideas, it was in the content contributed by the users. Albeit how far-fetched, or how far to the left, right or criminally insane these user contributions may seem, without this active, engaged content contribution, a BBS is nothing more than a museum presented in digital format. 

2.1. I probably violated the software license terms as I have modified the Citadel logo as it is displayed on my site. 

3. As I mentioned in 2, in my geographic area as a teenager, every kid in my high school computer class had a "home computer". A home computer was a commodore 64, an Atari ST, an Apple //c, or a 6502 based machine I forgot to mention. Remember though, this was a time when secondary education in the United States still considered the Xerox MemoryWriter (an 85-pound typewriter that could remember things to delete using pre-installed expensive correction tape) to be part of Computer class. I guess the educators in charge  envisoned "Gal Fridays" being more comfortable and productive with these modern typewriters. Perhaps mistakenly but probably not, I always thought that all "teachers" suffered from some genetic hindering condition that caused them to envision the future exactly 30 years behind the present we lived in.  It wasn't until junior (1988 I think?) year that some maniac talked the school board into purchasing an AT&T 3B2 Unix SVR4. The "computer teacher" was quickly outwitted by those of us t

4. I am pretty drunk while entering this post, not unlike most of my 4 am rants. I may have lost the original thought behind what I was trying to convey. 

5. Oh yeah, there it is. Back to #2... All those BBS systems that came online, the transport looked the same. The users were the same. There was overcrowding of BBS's to call and the ONLY thing (that I can think of) that inspired users to post content on different boards was not so much how a board was dressed up, but more because the caller hit busy signals.  ATDT13237415100    BUSY     NO CARRIER

Well, Fuckit then? so... ATDT1301ID10T...       CONNECT 2400     YAY! Now I can post all about buying 1/4 wave antenna parts at radio shack and see if anyone else knows how to use a signal-to-noise meter and I think I saw a message from a new user with a female name. And someone is selling a dodge diplomat, I do need a car.

6. I changed up the color gradients on my citadel and made some navigation text larger. After careful insight (I found more alcohol), I remember now why I did so. I am pushing 50 years old, and my vision ain't what it used to be. As an end-user of my own BBS, I needed certain elements to stick out, and others to be clearly where I expect to find them. 

7. When I start numbering the points I am making, it is in your best interest to zone out, much like if you were being forced to listen to some TED talk that you didn't sign up for. 

8. I do think that an easier way to edit the style of webcit should be made easier to the SysOp, but I have noticed that a great deal of effort has been made to keep the webcit and textcit (did I just name something?) experience inline, and consistent. The "textcit" experience is not affected by what happens in the webcit experience. I happen to love citadel because of its hybrid interface.  With this in mind, my guess is that someone (me I guess) should contribute a standalone editor that can be called from the administration tab in webcit just as PD has mentioned. I am thinking of making one that simply has starting and ending points for the gradients already in the default styles, or something a simple as a color picker. What you saw on my citadel, in my estimation could be best described as a "high contrast" theme.  Citadel's docs do provide some resources on style editing. Unfortunately, I  don't know where to find a deployment of citadel that doesn't look like all the others, except mine. My arti

9. We can make all the citadels we want, even until we run out of IP addresses. The real challenge we face is against the enemy we are fighting: centralized social media. Sysops of ANY systems fight an uphill battle, and it is only on one front: Engaging users to contribute their thoughts, ideas, failures, misgivings, triumphs, disease, and share all of these things in our forums. The largest enemy (lowercase F) gets the sheeple do this in their sleep, but we were the ones that invented this type of sharing. It is WAY too easy for someone to "share" content on Fecesbook, simply because smartfones come with Fecesbook preinstalled and ready-to-eat, dumbed down and idiot proof for anyone to use. What we do here, is HARD. Go find some rando on the street and try to explain to them that you have meaningful exhange of ideas online. Then try to explain to the same rando of just how to do it. Don't know about you but I think I would have a better time putting together complex Ikea furniture. Root canal.

10.  https://youtu.be/W8r-tXRLazs

Notes:

(1) The List is a big collection of shit I really need and want to complete. The List is funded wholly or in parts using the Round Tuit crypto currency. For each Round Tuit I get, I will check another item off The List. Sarah MacLachlan holding an abused unadopted puppy is a Registered Trademark of AnInformercialTookMyMoney.duh

they should make a .duh TLD. 

Sat Jun 05 2021 12:44:11 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Ig... 

If you haven't gotten over to Smashbot's Citadel - you should visit it. He has done some interesting things with the visuals that make me think that maybe you could work with him to set up some "themes" that are easily selected in the Advanced/Administration menus to customize the look on either a sitewide or per-user basis without needing to know about .xml stylesheets? 

I think it would help Citadel adoption - both from an administrative and user perspective. 

 

Ig... 

If you haven't gotten over to Smashbot's Citadel - you should visit it. He has done some interesting things with the visuals that make me think that maybe you could work with him to set up some "themes" that are easily selected in the Advanced/Administration menus to customize the look on either a sitewide or per-user basis without needing to know about .xml stylesheets? 

I think it would help Citadel adoption - both from an administrative and user perspective. 

The ability to grep the database *would* be a godsend. Once I gronked Grep - it became probably my favorite thing about *nix. 

Sun May 16 2021 11:15:56 EDT from smashbot64 Subject: Re: Last in my chain

 

Oh, that's another thing I plan to add to citadel.smashbot.

Grep. Its going to take some time though, because I will need a worker to dig in and present what needs to be parsed. 

 

Sun May 16 2021 09:52:55 EDTfrom ParanoidDelusions Subject: Re: Last in my chain

 I probably mentioned it here on Uncensored - but I'm not sure how you would find that message here. 

 

Oh, that's another thing I plan to add to citadel.smashbot.

Grep. Its going to take some time though, because I will need a worker to dig in and present what needs to be parsed. 

Sun May 16 2021 09:52:55 EDTfrom ParanoidDelusions Subject: Re: Last in my chain

 I probably mentioned it here on Uncensored - but I'm not sure how you would find that message here. 

 

Damnit. I wish I could remember what caused this and how I fixed it - but I did have the exact same thing happen. 

citadel.rc is in the path, right and being launched under the right account? I know I had this issue and it freaked me out - and I thought it was something to do with Putty - but maybe it ultimately wasn't - it was something silly I had done on the...  


Ok... where do you set up the Telnet daemon commands in Linux? Is it inet.d or initd or something like that? Or maybe it is the config in the . folder in the home directory of the account you're using to launch citadel.rc 

It is having something set wrong there, maybe. Like, the wrong command or a typo or something else. I think I vaguely recall that I found it was OE/fat-fingers in one of my config files. I probably mentioned it here on Uncensored - but I'm not sure how you would find that message here. 

Sun May 16 2021 00:07:49 EDT from ASCII Express Subject: Re: Last in my chain

I got the citadel to answer connections and present the bbs... but I
can't get it to authenticate. It doesn't give me the opportunity to
enter a password, for a new user account, or for one that I know
exists (mine).  Here's is a screenshot of what it's doing. Can
someone shed light on the probable simple oversight I have made?

Strange. I tried connecting, and had the same issue. I saw some characters before my name, and when I entered it I got:
'"'#ASCII Express' not found.
So it recorded the characters in the string. The single key response didn't work either. I hit Y <enter> to create the account, then it whipped past the password prompt. Strange! Can someone help?

Yeah - I'm counting you as our best bet to develop a way for the rest of us to run doors of some fashion on Citadel - you've just got to make it easy enough that a guy who can get a Citadel up and running can ALSO get doors up and working. :) 

I don't care if there are HTML tricks. New platforms require new paradigms of achieving the same goals. 

Fri May 14 2021 23:41:38 EDT from smashbot64

PD is well aware because he's seen it first hand, but Citadel IS a "door", of sorts, on my system (http://smashbot.com)

I have been working day and night trying to integrate Citadel as the message base center. As expected, the issue is who authenticates who? (or is it whom?) 

My chat site and citadel live as separate selections glued together by phpBB. They are all on the same system, so all three (chat, citadel, and phpBB) have access to the others files. 

Integration will be the death of me but I will figure it out, I make breaktrhoughs every time I pull an all nighter on it. 

I guess techically, the citadel I run is NOT a door by door definitions, since a user can hit the citadel simply by entering at https://citadel.smashbot.com

Wed May 05 2021 13:53:54 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

So, you're suggesting something more like having a Retrobbs software be the front-end - with Citadel running as a door off of it? 

It seems like there *is* a way to skin this cat - and that it is probably in breaking the paradigm that we feel comfortable approaching it from (Citadel is the main BBS - the doors come off of it.) 

 

Wed May 05 2021 10:48:47 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I posted this in the main Citadel support room but I'll put it here as

well. How about some kind of support for BBS doors?

Interestingly, we had a "doorway" command from the very first version in 1987. It was deprecated in 2007 and removed entirely in 2010. The reason for its removal was that we could not provide a consistent user experience across text, web, and client software users if we had doors running on only one type of login.

On a retro BBS site, it might actually make more sense to put Citadel on the *far* side of the doorway.

 

 

Speaking of text client, I just got my citadel to answer telnet on port 23. 

I really need to sic fail2ban in the role of Deputy Dog, since the amount of bullshit scanners tying up my port 23 is hell on my resources. But, that's a problem to fix tomorrow. 

BUT- but, but But---

I got the citadel to answer connections and present the bbs... but I can't get it to authenticate. It doesn't give me the opportunity to enter a password, for a new user account, or for one that I know exists (mine).  Here's is a screenshot of what it's doing. Can someone shed light on the probable simple oversight I have made?

PD is well aware because he's seen it first hand, but Citadel IS a "door", of sorts, on my system (http://smashbot.com)

I have been working day and night trying to integrate Citadel as the message base center. As expected, the issue is who authenticates who? (or is it whom?) 

My chat site and citadel live as separate selections glued together by phpBB. They are all on the same system, so all three (chat, citadel, and phpBB) have access to the others files. 

Integration will be the death of me but I will figure it out, I make breaktrhoughs every time I pull an all nighter on it. 

I guess techically, the citadel I run is NOT a door by door definitions, since a user can hit the citadel simply by entering at https://citadel.smashbot.com

Wed May 05 2021 13:53:54 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

So, you're suggesting something more like having a Retrobbs software be the front-end - with Citadel running as a door off of it? 

It seems like there *is* a way to skin this cat - and that it is probably in breaking the paradigm that we feel comfortable approaching it from (Citadel is the main BBS - the doors come off of it.) 

 

Wed May 05 2021 10:48:47 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I posted this in the main Citadel support room but I'll put it here as

well. How about some kind of support for BBS doors?

Interestingly, we had a "doorway" command from the very first version in 1987. It was deprecated in 2007 and removed entirely in 2010. The reason for its removal was that we could not provide a consistent user experience across text, web, and client software users if we had doors running on only one type of login.

On a retro BBS site, it might actually make more sense to put Citadel on the *far* side of the doorway.

 

Sat Apr 03 2021 11:09:11 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Could you add petscii (commodore) to the text served by citadel over
telnet? I know the petscii character encoding is well defined and
documented. I just don't know how to make citadel do it.

Hmm. That's an unusual ask. I used a Commodore 64 as my primary computer in the mid 1980s, so I know quite a bit about how PETSCII is laid out. What I don't know is how one would map it on a modern display. There seem to be Unicode equivalents to most of the special characters.

What is the use case you are trying to solve for?

There are many commodore bbs systems up and running via telnet to this day (for example the ones listed on http://cbbsoutpost.servebbs.com/) 

Some systems are original hardware that are interfaced via modified rs232 and modem emulator software like Leif Bloomqvist's BBS server, or Jim Brain's TCPSER,  to a linux or windows box to handle telnet connections. Some systems perfom this all through emulation without hardware patches to external telnet servers run on other machines like raspberry pi. 

Anyhow, without going down the rabbit hole, If I could get the citadel's text client server to speak petscii, I could use citadel for quite a powerful bbs software "engine" if you will. Pete Rittwage (c64preservation.com) has done what I am describing, but did not use Citadel to do it. 

Mapping to a modern display is the responsibility of the c64 terminal software. Simply asking the user at login "use commodore petscii?" and on an affirmative response, switch the output to petscii values. If no, standard utf-8 or whatever citadel spits out as it is written.

So, you're suggesting something more like having a Retrobbs software be the front-end - with Citadel running as a door off of it? 

It seems like there *is* a way to skin this cat - and that it is probably in breaking the paradigm that we feel comfortable approaching it from (Citadel is the main BBS - the doors come off of it.) 

Wed May 05 2021 10:48:47 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I posted this in the main Citadel support room but I'll put it here as

well. How about some kind of support for BBS doors?

Interestingly, we had a "doorway" command from the very first version in 1987. It was deprecated in 2007 and removed entirely in 2010. The reason for its removal was that we could not provide a consistent user experience across text, web, and client software users if we had doors running on only one type of login.

On a retro BBS site, it might actually make more sense to put Citadel on the *far* side of the doorway.

And if Citadel exposed that code - it would be up to the admin to work out the details on their back-end for what that Wiki page would be serving up. 

I mean, you could probably embed *Facebook* as a door inside a Citadel if this was implemented. :) 

I'm wondering if , in a modern context - it would be easier just to be able to make static rooms that would display a static webserver in a message. 

Kind of like an embedded YouTube video - but you could have a Citadel Wiki room, with the message in the wiki containing an embedded redirect to another (local) server, and that sever could be running .js DOSBox games... 

It would be the same net effect - a room where you could play a game without  "leaving" the BBS. The message would basically be a browser within your browser. 

Wed May 05 2021 00:40:38 EDT from ASCII Express

I agree, this development happens at the right time, and it excites me as well.
I posted this in the main Citadel support room but I'll put it here as well. How about some kind of support for BBS doors?

Honestly, I was originally considering JUST publishing the text client - I didn't have a lot of interest in the web-client or attracting NEW users - I had considered just catering to OG Citadel users who would PREFER the Text client. 

But the Sacramento Citadel community doesn't really seem to like one another much, any more - and doesn't seem to have the nostalgia for the old days that I have. They've got a group on Facebook and they barely talk to one another. Even the ones that agree with one another. 

It is a little sad. I've had a couple of the curious from the old Sacramento Citadel scene show up a few times - but eventually they lose interest and stop checking in. Others... even ones who've been accused of being part of "my circle of Right Wing followers who hang on my every word," on Facebook - won't even log in. Facebook turns people into Zombies. The WalMart/Target of Online community. 

Thu Apr 29 2021 10:54:35 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

It's still there ... it may even work, who knows :)

To understand why the text client is so peculiar, you have to understand that it is the direct descendant of the original "dialup BBS" code from the 1980s. It's literally a standalone BBS program that had its local datastore ripped out and replaced with a connection to a server.

I think some kind of node based cross-pollination is a great idea - and will probably create better engagement and increase traffic. Especially as it scales. 

Wed Apr 28 2021 14:44:55 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Public access Citadel sites will always be a bit off the beaten path. That's kind of the point. It's just one of many things Citadel can do, and the text client works pretty well in this use case.

In the future, federation/syndication features will allow multiple sites to operate and share content, but hopefully it will be a lot cleaner and smoother than what we did in the past. It's a very long road, shedding assumptions that were made in the dialup era.

I can't wait. I'm stoked to have gone from a Pi3 to a 4 core i5 with 1TB of SSD running a VM... and I'm excited to have Citadel moving forward in a way that I can safely and easily implement on that platform once it is ready. 

Improvements in the web client, in the text client, in the setup and configuration... cleaning up the code, making it easier to install and reconfigure. All of these things make me super happy. Even if I never break 3 to 5 regular "callers"... 

My Nephew operates a bunch of nefarious sites in Europe - You know the kind - they *look* like legitimate sites in style and content - if you're not being careful, you could BELIEVE you were on skynews.com but a careful inspection reveals you're on skyenews.com... 

Anyhow, he was asking me why I don't send tickler mails out to users "we haven't seen you in a while and miss you." 

And my response was - that is what the nightclub does - they send you flyers and mailers and texts and emails, "Come

But... I've got to get what I have settled first before I consider that. 

Tue Apr 27 2021 18:36:16 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Heh. I committed a bunch of changes to the text client today. None of them will have any effect on the visible application, quite yet ... it's just a program that has been neglected and deserves a little love. Aside from much of the code being written more than 30 years ago when I was a bit sloppy, it also still has support for a lot of things that will never be needed again (xmodem? cygwin? non-ansi terminals? servers more than 20 years old?)

There are a lot of assumptions one can make in 2021 that could not be made in 1987. And we're going to start making them. It will cut loose buckets of cruft.

It is awesome seeing tiny little things that have been broken for a while getting resolved. The activity in Citadel right now is just in time. 

Could you add petscii (commodore) to the text served by citadel over telnet? I know the petscii character encoding is well defined and documented. I just don't know how to make citadel do it.

Sat Mar 27 2021 11:07:24 AM EDT from darknetuser

2020-11-09 23:18 from IGnatius T Foobar
I think at some point in the future I'm going to rewrite the text
client, maybe even switch it over to use the REST API that is being

built as part of webcit-ng. If I did it in Python I could probably

hack one together in a weekend. Could be fun. Maybe even build it in

a way where your <G>oto loop takes you through multiple servers instead

of one. That would be cool.

I don't like how that sounds. I understand it would force you to install a webcit instance in order to be able to use the text client.

I prefer it the other way around myself: for the text client to be core functionality, and the web stuff an addon.

Strongly seconded. As few dependencies as possible for text.

I agree. I mean, when doors and floors became popular in the Sacramento Citadel developer scene - people were running "Forum based" BBSes as doors because they wanted the more "threaded" view of those kind of BBSes for certain topics or discussions. So, the idea... maybe that is the idea... 

How about floors, where the ground floor could be the regular, round-robin style presentation of traditional Citadel - but you could go up a FLOOR to a threaded more web-based/web oriented series of forums, topics, blogs, whatever? 

Set it so users could set their default floor on login... Start on the second floor and go down to the main floor... 

Fri Jan 25 2019 18:19:46 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Cool trick and tip of the day:

For those of you who fondly remember the days when there was an IBM 3270 terminal on your desk ... run the Citadel client locally on your machine and put "status_line=1" in your .citadelrc

You'll get an adorable status line on the screen that shows the host, room, etc. you're in, along with encryption status and the number of new emails you have. And for that authentic IBM flavor, you'll notice that on the right side there's a little "X" icon that appears when the client has a transaction in progress with the server.

(Yes, on a real 3270 it was a clock, but text-mode 3270 emulators always used an X instead)

Try it on a slow connection for that authentic "I'm waiting for the machinee" effect.

Cool. Thank you. BTW: I was searching for the config file... then I realized it's called `citadel.rc`

I'll take a look at it. Maybe inkI build my version on top of the ng.

It may be an idea to build the REST API as a separate module to allow every client based web application to use it...

That's one use case I had in mind.  We're being careful to keep the REST API cleanly segregated from the UI code so that other web clients can be swapped in.

The only issue is that the API is far from complete at this time.  You can log in, list rooms, and read messages.  I'm implementing API calls when I get to the point in the client application where I need them.

Mon Sep 03 2018 14:26:54 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Subject: Re: Contribution to realize "ReactCit"?

Hope I'll find some time. I've realized, first, I have to write an
HTTP to TCP bridge to get an HTTP based API for my client based web
application. Let's see ;) ...

Right. In any web based Citadel application you'll have to find a way to make the protocol *appear* stateless while actually maintaining server connections.
That will of course require some sort of middle layer.

In the current version of WebCit we handle this by rendering the entire UI server-side, and using cookies to connect HTTP requests to the correct session, and that session has a pinned-up connection to Citadel.

In the version being developed (webcit-ng, which you can find in the git repo) we're exposing a REST/DAV interface to Citadel, and rendering the UI on the client side. When a client performs an HTTP transaction it hunts for a session that is connected as the correct user (or as not-logged-in if appropriate) and binds to it for the duration of that transaction.

The obvious question is: why didn't we build the bottom layer as REST/DAV from the beginning? The answer is: it was 1994; who knew?

Thank you for the hint concerning webcit-ng.

I'll take a look at it. Maybe inkI build my version on top of the ng.

It may be an idea to build the REST API as a separate module to allow every client based web application to use it...

Sat Aug 25 2018 17:06:10 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Subject: Re: Contribution to realize "ReactCit"?

You're welcome! This is the exact use we intended for the protocol -- different developers working on different use cases with the Citadel server as a common underpinning for all of them.

I love that!

Hope I'll find some time. I've realized, first, I have to write an HTTP to TCP bridge to get an HTTP based API for my client based web application. Let's see ;) ...

That's great! Thank you for the link! :)

As an old BBS user and co-sysop, I really appreciate the existence of such an old system, as it's still under development.

I'm a web developer who loves to use React and Redux. I would like to write a web app for citadel, if there would be an open and complete API, which I could use to realize such a project. Is there a documentation and repository, where I could contribute such a thing?

In my mind, I like to realize a web app with a modern UI and another one, which simulates a terminal inside the browser.

Here are two XMPP projects - out of many - one a system for the 'man in the street', and another for the enterprise.

https://salut-a-toi.org/overview.html

I like SAT, it is very new but has many features and  lots of possibilities, and a few nice frontends. Also has gateways to connect to any protocols, and connects to email right now.

Worth having a look at the features and frontends pages.

http://buddycloud.com/

This project works with enterprise communications companies, including Mozilla, aswell as individual developers.

Yes i can understand where you are coming from, but what if the herd just migrate to another, closed garden of a system, like Face**k?

Actually movim is just a plain old XMPP client, and while being around the XMPP people, i see many new systems and much activity within the XMPP community.  I can see no reason to not

stay with XMPP as there is tons of exciting things happening still. And this was one of the things i think citadel was a little weak on in the web client, the XMPP feature really is great, but the interface could be much better.

I feel bad to say anything bad about citadel, because it is such a wonderful system, and i am not offering any solutions or help as some here do. 

I really don't think you should be waiting for any new fad to come along, social networking systems are everywhere, even wordpress has a seemingly good social networking plugin for it's system i see.  None of the systems the herd will migrate too is likely to use an open protocol are they? I'm not sure, but here at citadel you already have a system made with open protocols, especially email, which is everywhere and - correct me if i am wron - not likely to go away soon(?) and also XMPP which for all the things i heard of it's demise, i do not feel this is the case either - correct me if i'm wrong (?) but already having the userbase, albeit not the billions of the walled gardens  now, and still many people building very large commercial systems  with XMPP, aswell as the general populace - 'and' as this guy that built movim- among many - shows - a simple xmpp client with a nice interface is about all you need for a nice social network. I think Citadel already has a headstart in this department, it 'can'

You probably know me  by now, for a bit of , maybe nieve enthusiasm, but has any of that any merit in your opinion?

I thought maybe someone would be interested in the architecture of movim. So here is a blog post by the lead dev. It's always nice to hear the whys and hows of any project you like.

https://nl.movim.eu/?blog/edhelas%40movim.eu/how-s-made-movim-part-i-the-architecture-CCA7If

I have been using the movim social networking/xmpp system, and truly love it - just as i love Citadel. So i just created a chatroom for anybody that might be interested on Uncensored.

https://nl.movim.eu/?login/pCWx8ntu

True.  I had not thought of exploring the room features.  I had used the mailing lists in the past (great feature that goes underused I think).  The RSS feed is one I use every day though.  Another great feature.  Been doing a bit of Gopher lately for movie listings without any ads, weather reports, browsing the news.  Feels nice to be able to get the content without all the rest of the crap - same way the RSS feed does for me.  It also has the feel of using the text client (sort of).

Looking forward to it IG, but I share your practicality.  Still wish I had time to come up to speed on things and help in this effort.

P.S. I did not get back to the folks that were using the now deprecated citadel room sharing code.  I figure that will be locked in time (i.e. until they re-flash something and decide to test some update at a future date).  Hoping I get the time to explain all the new and exiting changes you folks are planning for the future to share with them when I am able to spend more time on implementation bits.

I am also happy to hear that you have an ear for the passion for taking in the best bits out there.  Keep up the good fight and know that your efforts (and all the Citadel coders) efforts are used and appreciated.  You are all unsung heroes as far as I am concerned.

Exciting stuff!

Mon Jun 04 2018 11:00:47 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

It's a pretty obvious change when you think about how web software is done now.  It still bugs me to have to "start over" in a sense, but when the WebCit project was started in 1996 I really didn't know what I was doing.  It was a couple of CGI scripts clumsily lashed to a server process that talked to Citadel, and presenting a UI using any weird hack I could manage.  The design pattern was wrong, the code was badly laid out, and the built-in web server was bolted on four years later, adding more spaghetti to the code.  The templating language seemed like a good idea at the time, and the implementation was pretty powerful, but it made code maintenance almost impossible.

webcit-ng is written very cleanly, with good separation between layers, and avoiding some of the design mistakes made in other parts of the system.  For example, we pass all of the state of both the HTTP transaction and the Citadel session up and down the stack instead of constantly querying for thread-specific data.  And to be honest, there are places where big chunks of code are being brought over from legacy webcit to webcit-ng, but they're being cleaned up and fitted into the new program instead of trying to fix what was in the old program.

It's a great little project and I'm really happy with what we've built so far.  But that's part of what's making it take so long.  And of course it doesn't have a UI yet.  :)

It's a pretty obvious change when you think about how web software is done now.  It still bugs me to have to "start over" in a sense, but when the WebCit project was started in 1996 I really didn't know what I was doing.  It was a couple of CGI scripts clumsily lashed to a server process that talked to Citadel, and presenting a UI using any weird hack I could manage.  The design pattern was wrong, the code was badly laid out, and the built-in web server was bolted on four years later, adding more spaghetti to the code.  The templating language seemed like a good idea at the time, and the implementation was pretty powerful, but it made code maintenance almost impossible.

webcit-ng is written very cleanly, with good separation between layers, and avoiding some of the design mistakes made in other parts of the system.  For example, we pass all of the state of both the HTTP transaction and the Citadel session up and down the stack instead of constantly querying for thread-specific data.  And to be honest, there are places where big chunks of code are being brought over from legacy webcit to webcit-ng, but they're being cleaned up and fitted into the new program instead of trying to fix what was in the old program.

It's a great little project and I'm really happy with what we've built so far.  But that's part of what's making it take so long.  And of course it doesn't have a UI yet.  :)

One feeling i have after using movim for a little while now, is: What a lovely User Interface! :P

It is so simple, well laid out/intuitive and there is no difference using it on a wide laptop screen or a small smartphone.

This is one thing that would 'make' citadel, and especially having the side menu similar to movim, simplified and useable on a mobile/smartphone.

I know the new webcit will be mobile friendly, so will fix the current problems hopefully, is there any news anyone can share about the new citadel UI?

I would love to see a simplified set of icons, as well as a mobile friendly/mobile client UI and especially side menu (if you will keep this layout?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movim

I am on: https://nl.movim.eu username mikeao

https://nl.movim.eu/?contact/mikeao%40movim.eu

Please have a look, and say hi. (after evaluating, lots of FOSS social networking systems, and just finding - and falling in love with movim (as much as i found and fell in love with citadel-- and still am <3 <3 !! ) i would highly recommend you guys sign up here, even just for a brief look, and  to say hi to mo/mikeao :) .

Is your sample size less than one?

How many police officers have you asked?

Sun May 13 2018 11:35:41 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Two of my son's friends have volunteered to accompany me on a trip to California to assault Mark *uckerberg with a baseball bat until F*c*book ceases to exist. 

That is where I begin to worry, should we call the police now or wait until you get half way across the country?

Yeah. I figured as much. I suppose I can do that.

I haven't been able to connect via telnet for a couple of days. It might be me, but I figure I should say something...

You  might  encourage  more  people  to  sign up

Be kinda like Jerry Springer social knockabout.

So how do we make it easy for the common woman/man in the street to hit F*c*b**k over the head and bury it once and for all?

(or untill they can pluck up the courage: use more than just one way to communicate/socialize online, that is not F*c*b**k?)

What you just said, is a compelling argument, to those who know their digital onions, in my opinion. As for the other 90% who are all on facebook and instagram, it definitely would not make much sense to them.

Well - i will try running a server or two soon. If i can get a few people, even a handful, from my social circle to try something new, it would be great.

I have two things i would like, for me, and my friends: Email, and social software.

So i will set up my first citadel, and one more system, to try and get a few of my lot to try something new.

In all honesty, citadel, is all you need, i would think. If their was a good mobile client, it would clinch the deal.

btw the last access database/list thingy, whatever you call it, seems to work now in webcit. I jump straight to last conversations  now, instead of being stuck in november 2017. :)

Here are some of the systems using the diaspora protocol:

https://the-federation.info/

And the activitypub protocol, which some of the above systems (hubzilla for sure) can use also, is used by mastodon (sdf.org have a great mastodon server),

and many others, including nextcloud, the owncloud fork (by the original owncloud dev team):

https://nextcloud.com/blog/activitypub-the-new-standard-for-decentralized-networks/

And activitypub is now reccomended as a standard by the W3C, after three years work on it.

Former Diaspora community manager Sean Tilley wrote a good article on activitypub as a future way to federate internet platforms:

https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334

I aim to delete facebook one day, and am looking at a few alternatives, aswell as citadel ;) .

I personally think citadel can fill the social network role perfectly, and has the virtue of so many powerful features.

My friends and family will be the ones to convince, when i set up a server, to coax them away from facebook, however, so i will 

make a decision one day, based on that.

All the networks i am  trying, federate in some way with each other, mainly using the ostatus and activitypub protocols, or the diaspora protocol. These cover a network of about a dozen FOSS decentralised social networks with well over a million users (by virtue of mastodon, otherwise in the tens of thousands for the others put together).

I read citadel will be ditching it's own federation protocol, in favour of standard web protocols. Has their been any thought, of supporting one of the social networking protocols, mentioned?

I mean citadel is a great FOSS decentralised system; in my view replacing: Facebook, and Gmail in one stroke- which seem to me the most important things to most people, apart from file sharing.

Wouldn't it be appealing to have citadel, as part of the greater Federation/fediverse? Aswell as new citadel users, you may attract some more developers for the project.

Just a thought! :)  

I forgot to say, the same guy also mentioned the source download links on the easyinstall.citadel.org page did not work.

(and an asside, i just noticed one of the guys in support talking about the delta chat app/messenger via email app -  very cool,

what is the future of xmpp here at citadel though i wonder?)

( https://delta.chat/en/   :P )

Ah good! I still don't know how ahhz overcame this issue . (?) :)

Changing the subject to another aspect of Citadel:

I recently joined a mastodon server run  by sdf.org. It's suprisingly good, i am enjoying the whole experience.

I have recently been talking about deleting my facebook account, and i have mentioned a few times the virtues of running a citadel server,

over the more well know social software like, diaspora. There is a few people very interested, i hope they join in here.

However one guy was talking of the xmpp feature here, which stopped him from taking up the system. This is not current now so he will not be looking in at

the support room. So i would like to know if he was correct in his assumptions.

He was saying xmpp here only allows plaintext auth over unencrypted streams,  and there was no support for STARTTLS.

He dug up his original (mastodon) 'toot. here:

https://mastodon.technology/@dasyatidprime/99177823238413523

I made a new blog post here on uncensored, and also replied to a comment here by ahhz. My own comment was turned into a file that could be 'view'ed or 'download'ed, not like ahhz's which posted for all to see. How do i do an ahhz, and post a comment for all to see?

Also the two options on the comment post, "view" and "download", do not work as expected. View presents the text file to be downloaded, and "Download" presents the text file in a new page to be viewed in all it's (plain text) glory on the web. :)

Well, here's the path that I walked in the text client.  Hitting H brings up the main basic help menu.  At the end of it, it says to "USE .<H>elp ?  or ..<H>elp SUMMARY for additional help.  

Hitting either of those produces errors - .H? says '?' not found, enter one of the built-in list, and .HSUMMARY is similar, as it no longer exists.

And then even in the list produced from help.h, which includes admin, floors, intro, mail, network, policy and software, policy says "this new user policy resides in ./messages/newuser", and there should be one more option in help.h, probably "summary", as I think that's what's coded at the bottom of help.h - the full list of commands.

Having all of those built-in options working or fleshed out would be great, but I wonder if there would be an easy way to get back the full customizability (whether the help was stored in the DB or flat files) where the sysop could extend the help system out however they liked.

Anyhow, it came to light for me as I was looking to see what a new user who wasn't familiar with Citadel might encounter if coming from the text client perspective.

Not too long ago, the client help files were moved "into" the client.  This was done because they were being loaded from the server, and it isn't the server's role to provide client infrastructure.

Honestly though, I didn't think anyone cared.  I guess I was wrong.  What are your customization needs and how can we make it work better for you?

I see, I was confusing the SSH login with the text client login.

Hmm...

When I tried ssh bbs@uncensored.citadel.org from home, it could not resolve the DNS.

Earlier when I tried it at work, it could not resolve the DNS.

But, oddly, now it is.

I shall resume my dramatic exposition at a time when the situation is more real.

Alas, no more ssh bbs@uncensored.citadel.org.  No more text client access to Uncensored.  No more joy left in the world.

Thu Apr 06 2017 13:39:00 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Feature request: can we have a year view for the new webcit?

(Yes, sometimes I take this long to answer.) :)

I haven't even come close to working on the calendar rendering for WebCit-NG yet, but the short answer is:

The server engine will feed calendar data to the browser in machine-readable format (probably JSON, which is what I've been using for everything else) and then the view will be rendered by JavaScript code running in the browser.
This means that we can theoretically do whatever views we want. I think a week view is more important than a year view, but if we model it correctly, we should be able to do day, work week, full week, month, year, and agenda view from the same code.

That's great news! I really like having the year view, it's very helpful for for visualizing and planning ahead. I think a good web calendar is another draw for using the system; maybe 'the icing on the cake'.

:P

I'm glad you found the answer to your question :) 

Sat Mar 18 2017 15:12:20 EDT from jp10558 @ Uncensored Subject: Check Version?

I just did an update from easy_install - but how can I tell what version of Citadel I'm now running?

Try asking in the support room. ;)

I just did an update from easy_install - but how can I tell what version of Citadel I'm now running?

... but when it is the right time in the universe to rewrite, can we have a command line calendar and task management functionality? :D

Fri Jul 08 2016 11:42:01 EDT from LoanShark @ Uncensored

But it isn't worth rewriting, not at this moment in the universe
anyway.

Sure. It exists for nostalia's sake anyway, so it might as well remain as a shrine to itself.

(I still use webcit only about twice a year, to view some very important image upload.)

Where do we post about contactlist chaos? I cannot add a contact to my addressbook it just changes my own email contact details. :)

This belongs in WhoList shenanigans but
(not logged in) [13]

Many bots but I always see a lot of users not logged in.

Changing the subject: i logged in today, to find my ISP/hostname was the top of the "not logged in" user/s (there were 19 not logged in, so that is 19 people/or bots viewing the web or text clients to this system?)

Strange! Or is this normal?

Just sent you a zip archive with some quick sketches and notes. Let me know what you think.

Wed Feb 22 2017 02:29:51 EST from mo @ Uncensored

Sure, just made a few sketches for you. I can send you an email with the relevant stuff, or can post here.

Sat Feb 18 2017 15:57:56 EST from the_mgt @ Uncensored

Hm, what kind of year view do you have in mind? Can you give me an example image? Or sketch up something? Even a pencil sketch is ok, so that I get to see what you need.

I wonder how much detail you want to see.

 

Sure, just made a few sketches for you. I can send you an email with the relevant stuff, or can post here.

Sat Feb 18 2017 15:57:56 EST from the_mgt @ Uncensored

Hm, what kind of year view do you have in mind? Can you give me an example image? Or sketch up something? Even a pencil sketch is ok, so that I get to see what you need.

I wonder how much detail you want to see.

Hm, what kind of year view do you have in mind? Can you give me an example image? Or sketch up something? Even a pencil sketch is ok, so that I get to see what you need.

I wonder how much detail you want to see.

This isn't so bad. Good functionality using a year view. I have yet to find any kind of web calendar with a really good year view, which is suprising.

http://bootstrap-calendar.eivissapp.com/

I don't want to clutter the development board, so i will clutter up this one.

Feature request: can we have a year view for the new webcit?

Also i see you are thinking of using the w3schools template thingey, funny i was looking at that the otherday and was thinking of using one of their css templates for a home hosted site.

So as a complete new user can i be of any assistance to whoever is doing the css thingey, maybe calendar thingey ?? I can break it for sure but i am certain i can do something to help given a few pointers.

 zooer@-Desktop:~$ citadel bbs@uncensored.citadel.org
 Attaching to server...
 Can't connect: No such file or directory

 zooer@Desktop:~$ citadel uncensored.citadel.org
 Attaching to server...
 Can't connect: Connection refused

What am I doing wrong with the text client?

*sigh*

Every time I look at the source code to the text client, I'm reminded of how bad my coding style was, almost 30 years ago.

That's what's mostly in there, of course, because when our Citadel implementation was split up into client and server in 1995, the structure and form of the monolithic implementation was left in the client, and the server was built as a new program.  So the client still has ugly stuff all over the place, lots of goto statements and flow that just doesn't make sense.

But it isn't worth rewriting, not at this moment in the universe anyway.

I have received the not found error once or twice.  A few times I see a new message from user "-1" it says something odd like click on a button to edit something.

I have noticed odd read/unread message counts when switching between the client and the web interface.

This can't be the only room that is not unread when I log in to the web client.  Or can it?  I am posting here as a test, and will check again with the web client later to see if it un-sets the un-read message count. :-)

Sorry about that ... telnetd was throwing a "-p" at the client on the command line and I accidentally removed the code to parse that.  It's fixed now.

You can also connect with SSH as user "bbs"

It looks like the text client needs a bit of saving. All I get when I try to telnet into Uncensored is: 

"couldn't stat citadel.config: No such file or directory"

It is a trap.

Yeah, it's the "ubuntu layer" for MS Windows 10, but I did discover that you have to put Windows into "developer mode" and accept beta-quality code (whatever that means in Microsoft land) and they don't recommend you run it "on a production machine" so I may have to wait a little while longer.

Once you've got it running, though, you can get the Citadel client right out of the Ubuntu repository, simply by opening a bash prompt and typing "apt-get install citadel-client"

Sat Apr 30 2016 11:03:08 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

So ... as Ragnar pointed out in the Citadel Support room ... the text client works flawlessly on the new Microsoft/Ubuntu Linux layer for Windows. You need doze10 to run it, though. Still good news for those of us who are penguinistas stuck on Windows machines at work.

MS Windows 10, you mean?   I mostly use Debian or Ubuntu, but I've been planning to install Windows 10 Pro on one of my PCs;  in part so I could check out that Microsoft/Ubuntu Linux layer for Windows.  (I spend much of my time working in command line windows, doesn't matter all that much to me which GUI I'm using...)   And trying out the citadel text client is another thing I planned to test;  glad to hear that it works all right.  Does it matter which version of the text client is used.

Schweet.  Glad I am not a Wintendo drone (since 1999!).  Good to hear they are catching up though.  Also glad to hear that the Red Sea has parted.  Just hope the other predictions come true.

Sat Apr 30 2016 11:03:08 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

So ... as Ragnar pointed out in the Citadel Support room ... the text client works flawlessly on the new Microsoft/Ubuntu Linux layer for Windows. You need doze10 to run it, though. Still good news for those of us who are penguinistas stuck on Windows machines at work.

It was just some horrible hack I used to allow someone that connected to my packet radio node program to get to Citadel in a text client way (telnet based like one of the old text clients).  It was a learning experience in telnet for me - especially the bits on the negotiation between the client and the server.

It is not worth viewing, but here it is:

http://penguinpackets.com/~kelly/kblog/projects

Umm ... to the best of my knowledge there is no Python text client.   There are Python bindings to the Citadel wire protocol, but no client.

Honestly though, if I were to bind in an extension language for Citadel, it would almost certainly be JavaScript.

Wed Mar 23 2016 01:53:34 EDT from ax25 @ Uncensored

The text client shall live on in Python (badly written and buggy), but at least you can see the bugs in the source code.  No, you can't understand the writers intention (even if they used docstrings).

Just kidding.  Carry on (writing it in C).  C is not bad, but I have to think too much to grock it these days.

 

Where can we see the python text client?

The text client shall live on in Python (badly written and buggy), but at least you can see the bugs in the source code.  No, you can't understand the writers intention (even if they used docstrings).

Just kidding.  Carry on (writing it in C).  C is not bad, but I have to think too much to grock it these days.

That's pretty much the case for any tech, if you can build a command line program to work with it, you know you didn't overbuild complexity.

Just goes to show that old tech is not the worst thing to have on hand.

During the "Merry X-mass" Ddos on Linode - vm hoster - (especially the Atlanta colo - where my Citadel instance lives), connectivity was grim.

Thanks to SMTP and the text clients ability to live on like a cockroach in a nuclear war, I was able to send and receive email during periods of 80 to 95% packet loss.  When things got to 100%, even SMTP timeouts and the text client called it a day.  But, with those options, I did ride out the outage with a small grin of satisfaction with my choice of MTA / MUA setup.  Thanks to the Citadel crew.  

Wed Dec 09 2015 13:14:18 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Subject: Re: Calendar, Contacts?

It's clear that we have to support CalDAV and CardDAV. We might even have to invent a "MailDAV" and "CitadelConfigDAV" and a few other *DAV's and write connectors for popular clients :)

And so you can access your calendar/events and citadel contact on the command line with the two python programs i posted earlier, that support CALDAV and CARDDAV respectively.

Is there any plans, or do you think it a good idea, for the text client to support CALDAV/CARDDAV access, or would there be a way to call an external program or script to get this functionality?

Thats cool!  Sounds like a great citadel advocacy story.  :) 

Well John, at least one of the guys here has pointed out the merits of using Gopher as a mobile client for citadel as opposed to a webclient. I mean Gopher looks gorgeous on android via the overbite project.

As far as i am aware,  CALDAV (CARDDAV?) support is planned for Citadel for the near future.

I haven't had the chance to look into the calendar/contacts syncing aspects of Citadel yet.  I'm a little skeptical of the reliability of the GroupDAV protocol (vs. CardDAV/CalDAV which lets you sync one event at a time vs.sending the entire calendar each time).

Anyhow, yes I am that John Goerzen, author of PyGopherd.  What can I say, old stuff fascinates me sometimes ;-)

I built up a Citadel install over the weekend to give my 9-year-old his first real email account.  Some Exim magic in front of it, and it's nicely restricted to only family. Pretty nice.  I gave him textclient only so far, and he picked it right up.  He's excited.

John

khard, was the address-book program:

https://github.com/scheibler/khard

I will post about these, with more details, in the room:  "Software" in the floor: "Computer Level"  

http://uncensored.citadel.org/dotgoto?room=Software#nonewmsgs

Hi John,

I was just about to post about a couple of command line programs people here might be interested in:

A command-line calendar program, that can read and write events/icalendars and sync with amongst other things CALDAV servers.

I have a local copy on my machine with the exported contents of my google calendar on it, works a treat.

https://github.com/geier/khal

... and also a command-line  contact manager/addressbook, that "reads, modifies and removes carddav address book entries at your local machine". Also syncs with CALDAV/CARDAV servers like Baikal

I have a local copy on my machine with my google contacts in VCARD format (just remember that your address-book needs to seperate all the contacts into seperate VCARD files ). It works a treat from the command-line. I also setup mutt for the first time to test it with this program, and now can access my gmail (citadel next ) imap folders with mutt and query my khal address-book from mutt too.

I have not synced the khal calendar, or khard address-book but they both use vdirsyncer to sync with CALDAV/CARDAV servers.

https://github.com/untitaker/vdirsyncer

I would love to see the planned citadel CALDAV support tested against these programs. Is it feasable to have the text client to somehow use these to access our calendar events and contact data directly?

Btw John, are you by any chance  John Goerzen the author of PyGopherd?

Mike

Thanks a lot, patch applied.

Confirmed.  The attached patch fixes this.

I see you are well versed :-)  Please ignore my pointing out of the API.  Going to my corner now. HI HI.

The option exists to write your own client (might be fun).  I have tried, and sorta have one.  It does not expose anything more than the message functions that the current client does, but you could use the protocol.  It looks like the parts are there (for ical at least):

http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/documentation:applicationprotocol

Not sure if this is the place to report such things -- please let me know if not.

I have a brand new installation here, citadel-server 9.01, citadel-client 8.24, both Debian testing packages.

I have a 100% reproducible problem uploading textfiles.  Here's what it looks like:

Test] . Enter Textfile
Enter filename: test
Receiving test - press Ctrl-D to end.
test
*** Transfer successful.
Enter a short description of 'test':
: desc
*** Error in `/usr/bin/citadel': free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x00000000019580f0 ***

gdb was not helpful.  However, strace showed a failure right after sending UOPN (and getting 200 Ok from the server.

Looking at the source, I see this:

        aaa = (char *)malloc(strlen(save_as) + strlen(comment) + 7);
        if (!aaa) return -1;

        sprintf(aaa, "UOPN %s|%s|%s", save_as, MimeType,  comment);
        ret = CtdlIPCGenericCommand(ipc, aaa, NULL, 0, NULL, NULL, cret);
        free(aaa);

That's a buffer overflow.  strace showed the write as:

write(3, "UOPN test|application/octet-stream|desc\n", 40) = 40

But the buffer really only permitted 5 characters for the MimeType.  I believe this could be corrected by simply using

        aaa = (char *)malloc(strlen(save_as) + strlen(MimeType) + strlen(comment) + 7);

Hope this helps.

John

Hi folks,

I'm guy that was a BBS Sysop 20 years ago (not Citadel, sigh) and have been rediscovering this software for various reasons.

I'm trying out the text client, and can't seem to find a way to add Calendar or Contacts entries with it.  Any ideas?

Thanks,

John

Ahh cool!  And you are post 345.

Yes the beginning seems a good place to start.Hope this is not a silly question, but:

Does it matter what language any of the things i mentioned  in jest (that's me off the hook :) ) , are written in?

where should i start on that list? :)

waiting for your patches.

... and a console calendar which includes a 'year' view. :P

contacts, appointment, diary, todo, checklists, notes, and 'in house' talker/conferencing system with split screen capability so we can continue talking while we surf the message boards, or compose mail, and independant of the room based xmpp messaging, capable of being used at anytime anywhere on the system, by anyone many to many, and any and all users at any time, thingey. :)

with a menu option with full screen scrollable ncurses goodness. :P

Sig, I hear ya.  I suggested Citadel to my peeps doing low bandwidth comms with good old Eric Westguard (NY9D).  Hope you have the chance to meet him some day Sig.  He is an all around good guy.  Knows tech, and he knows politics.  But #1 he knows tech and how to motivate people.

Agreed Mo.  Thanks for suggesting it to me.  Love using Gopher (even works well over 2G networks!)

Having seen gopher, via overbite, on android; i can only think it would be a great candidate for 'the' citadel mobile client, as far as the BBS goes (floors and rooms), without the groupware.

Sounds like a great idea!! 

Goforit TaMeR.  If you will program it, I will use it :-)  Double if you write it in Python:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyGopherd

I don't know about using Pine or Matt on an Android or iPhone.
I guess you could, but I meant something more like a Gopher browser like Overbite

I like the text client!
I have a citadel installation on my laptop and use the text client sometimes, since webcit isn't installed.

I can highly recommend this setup, since Thunderbird really slows down on large cached mail folders.
I have Thunderbird imap in to the local, actually in to an lxc container that runs only citadel.

Besides the local client, I am also curious have you ever considered providing access to public rooms via the gopher protocol.

This should work great for mobile connectivity since it will use much less bandwidth.

I know this would be against the webcit principle since webcit saves (unfortunately) everything as html.
Creating a gopher only room template and providing access with citadel would be the way to go I guess.

Any thoughts? The gopher protocol is very simple.

Sun Jan 11 2015 07:34:12 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

dothebart can correct me on this, but I don't think that change ever got backported to the stable track from which the debian packages are built. I know it's your pet peeve and hopefully we'll fix that soon; I've got one of my own: the output of only two lines when you read the list of who is online.

Really the whole Citadel suite is in need of a code freeze so we can push a major release out the door and eliminate the two tracks for a while.

no, I didn't backport anything...

yes, we need to get it done, but we're definitely too late for jessie.

This is the interactive shell we have running over at Cascade Lodge for folks with accounts on the machine:

===========================================================

Select from the following:

GAMES             |  BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS  |  COMMANDS
------------------+--------------------------+-----------------------------
1: Zork I         |  4: Cascade Lodge BBS    |   m: Show Current MOTD
2: Zork II        |  5: Dogpound II BBS      |   w: Current Remote Users
3: Zork III       |  6: UnCensored BBS       |  up: Full Uptime Report
G: More Games !!  |  7: Quartz II BBS        |  ch: Run Gateway PING Test
------------------+--------------------------+-----------------------------

Enter your choice or Q to quit:

===========================================================

It all lines up perfectly in a TTY session (for which it was designed).

--K2NE

Over at Cascade Lodge Citadel I have a shell script that a few of us use that has a few games available:

1. Zork 1, 2, and 3.

2. Adventure

3. Boggle

4. Hack

5. Hangman

6. Trek

and

7. Worm

This can be run by selecting the script at any linux comand line. It also allows execution of a small subset of linux commands and access to Cascade, Dogpound2, and Uncensored via ssh.

The script can also run as a login shell, but I fear security issues so I just don't do that.

--Vince (K2NE)

Ah Tradewars.  Fun, even at 2400 baud.

Mon Dec 29 2014 11:57:30 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Someday I'll finish ctdlsh, which will allow the removal of numerous sysadmin functions from our beloved Text Client. Or perhaps the entire client could be rewritten in Python. Who knows. There's a *lot* of bit rot in there.

I'd realy love to see something with ctdlsh (maybe even with python) which enables us to write unit tests in a very compact manner.

I realy enjoy the arangodb way of writing unittests in .js - one can use the full arango js api for all the setup & teardown - like creating specific collections, filtering the results, expecting whats to be there...

https://github.com/triAGENS/ArangoDB/blob/master/js/server/tests/aql-optimizer-rule-use-index-range.js

That way AQL is revalidated - the Arango db Query language. We also reach a pretty descent code coverage ratio that way.

and - yes - I realy enjoy my day to day work can be viewed publicaly at github ;-)

Thu Nov 27 2014 01:14:30 PM EST from fleeb @ Uncensored

Alternatively, you could build Python extensions that integrate with Citadel, to give you all the power of a shell with none of the extra hassle of figuring out language constructs.

Yes.  Do this and I will come to the party.  If this happens, I will also try to extend or even write c extensions to the base libs (assuming what I wrote would pass muster).

Uncoincidentally, since 2009 I have been working on a "ctdlsh" utility which no one will ever use.  :)

(Don't get excited, I've probably spent a couple of hours tops on this idea.  It's basically just a system administration shell.  Right now all it can do is shut the server down, change a user's password, and tell you what time it is.)

Basically though, this seems to be the way people write command line utilities in the 21st century (on real computers anyway; in wintendo-land they have powershell crap that no one can figure out) -- build a "shell" for the application domain, give it a bunch of subcommands that can perform any task, and allow it to run in scripts or using GNU readline when running interactively.

Try another browser instead of the IE replacement Firefox. Or stop using SSL :D

Currently only chrome/chromium based browsers are reasonably fast with Webcit and SSL enabled.

"goosh is written by Stefan Grothkopp <goosh@xsg.de>
it is NOT an official google product!"     but you get the google ads still :) actually very cool! I think!? :/

Well, that and they sexy . commands!

Not like that.  More like this ->

http://goosh.org/#help

useless, there are terminal emulators for browsers ready there.

Someone should write a version of the text client for the browser.

For this visit I am logged in via the GUI. I hate it.

It's comparatively slow; no - it's REALLY slow.

The text client is snappy - it's VERY fast.

Only thing I like about doing it this way is the display of images and text enhancements.

That, however, is absolutely not essential to the primary task - communicating.

--K2NE

Hi guys,
Recently, our group are trying to find ssl security problems by static anlysis. Now we have find some problems in citadel-client and report this bugs to the launchpad, but we haven't receive any responses.
3785301@Uncensored

Ah good! I'll let it demode away then! Ignorance is bliss  B)

Thu Sep 04 2014 14:23:02 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Not even needed anymore. I just checked the rival BBS and it's had maybe half a dozen posts this year, mostly saying things like "hey wow this is still here and I still remember the key commands to use it"

They probably *wish* Ygorl would show up.

Ahh ! You meant another citadel bboard (DOC?), not sdf.org? Bit late but better than never for me anyway :) .

Also to Sig: I will suggest again on sdf.org about them having a citadel, a nice shiny new modern one. If a few people make a noise smj will listen.

If you want to add your voice it would lend alot of weight i should think. You seem to know citadel pretty well, they would listen. I'll let you know, please let me know if i can count on a little support if i need it :) .

Wowza.  And I thought ax.25 was not well behaved.  I guess it is a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to dumping bad clients.  Actually, I think I did write a cleanup tool for that sort of mess in Python a while back for an older Apache install that did just that.  Can't remember the method, but I think it was a simple older than x, big hammer down design.  That server might still be alive, so I should see what that bit of mess I did was.

Ah, I am back.  No, sadly, it turns out I was wrong.  The script I was thinking about just killed off any apache2 / httpd procs that had a direct parent of pid 1.  Did the job well as there was no obvious way to serve if your parent pid is 1.  Of course that will all change with the new shiny systemd :-)

Thu Sep 18 2014 04:40:30 PM EDT from dothebart @ Uncensored

not that there has been too much trafic in the repo meanwile :-(

http://code.citadel.org/?p=citadel.git;a=tree;f=textclient;h=dde4604f5b748c8cda7861a3de685613e14d3459;hb=921ebdb7dbcdc32ab677a531b291663b95c6b6a5

not that there has been too much trafic in the repo meanwile :-(

http://code.citadel.org/?p=citadel.git;a=tree;f=textclient;h=dde4604f5b748c8cda7861a3de685613e14d3459;hb=921ebdb7dbcdc32ab677a531b291663b95c6b6a5

Next time your there have a look at there talker program, ' com ' (for commode ) :)

And on another rival BBS -  ( ssh mono@mono.org  ) check out there version of forums B) (if you could see how many messages are left in one day it would be quite busy)

Now in my opinion the talker on hahaemm sdf + the forum  style boards on mono with email/messaging wizardry of citadel and a text user interface for the calendar and contacts / PIM functionality  would be heaven :) (at least for me anyway ;) )

Hi Sig,

Have you ever suggested to anyone over there, that they run their own citadel server? I think it would be a great fit with sdf.org/sdfeu.org ...

I have suggested it to a couple of guys, but i'm not really a regular on SDF. Also SDF, when it was a BBS, actually did run on the unix version of citadel.

No they rose!   

Flour pour!   :)

Maybe a breadmaker!!

Bowl-flower-water-  (|) <--- Press here -go make coffee-come back in 20-put mixture in oven for 30--enjoy

... use as a coffee table when it's switched off!

One clue: What was Caine, where did he come from? (i think that was one clue?)

Warm though!  :)

Two Lumps = cool!! 

Now your guess: 'Grasshopper!' ;)

Sounds reasonable!

Maybe i should start using the text client more often? It seems to have some better features than the web client. A text calendar and PIM thingey would be awesome.

But!

What i would like to know is:

If you can have private rooms (only the administrator can create and add users to a private room?), it figures that you can have private group/room chats, is that right?

Yes it would be nice to see who is available to chat in a room, like you can see how many messages are in the room just below the title.

Also notifications when there are new messages in the room chat.

Split screen/ new window voodoo would be even better but that does seem like alot of work :) .

I heard mention you can see who is available to chat via the who's online list, when using the text client? This would be nice in webcit too(?)

excact - which makes it even harder to meet people - aside that you don't see it in webcit that someone is currently in the room chat to lead you into joining that chat.

and - roomchats aren't logged.

I'm now the proud owner of a new folder in my personal folders list: "Sent/Received Pages" where i have the full log of the one2one message with fleeb. B)

I have no record of the room chat i had with fleeb in the lobby, or the later chat had today in the lobby.  :( I was hoping here would be another folder in my list with that? Also, i couldn't cut n paste the last chat session i had when in webcit :(   )

But still B) nice to IM within citadel.

... please feel free to send me a message via the chat any time you see me online!! I would like to see the chat feature in action.

btw i have never used the xmpp/chat feature of citadel, so if anyone wants to say hi to me ... pleae do :P.

I usually log in via the webcit UI and would like to see the chat in action actually B) .

just tried again success!  One problem, i've never used the chat feature at uncensored :(

still! :) 

""

19:04 <@mynick> account add jabber mo@uncensored.citadel.org XXpassXX
19:04 <@root> Account successfully added
19:04 <@mynickagain> account on
19:04 <@root> Trying to get all accounts connected...
19:04 <@root> jabber(mo@uncensored.citadel.org) - Logging in: Connecting
19:04 <@root> jabber(mo@uncensored.citadel.org) - Logging in: Connected to server, logging in
19:04 <@root> jabber(mo@uncensored.citadel.org) - Logging in: Authentication finished

""

well i added my citadel account  and when i tried connecting it issued an error message saying TLS is turned on here, but not supported in bitlbee (i think?):

"

20:17 <@mike> account add jabber mo@unceonsored.citadel.org MyPassWord uncensored.citadel.org 5222
20:17 <@root> Warning: Passing a servername/other flags to `account add' is now deprecated. Use `account set' instead.
20:17 <@root> Account successfully added with tag jabber
20:17 <@mike> account on
20:17 <@root> Trying to get all accounts connected...
20:17 <@root> jabber - Logging in: Connecting
20:17 <@root> jabber - Logging in: Connected to server, logging in
20:17 <@root> jabber - Login error: TLS is turned on for this account, but is not supported by this server
20:17 <@root> jabber - Logging in: Signing off..

"

I was following an out of date tutorial maybe (2009). So i will try again with docs from current bitlbee

well, I also use bitlebee and irssi, but didn't try to connect it to citadels xmpp yet.

hint: just try it out ;-)

My reasoning for posting the previuos hgere , is because i use a text IRC client and Bitlbee fits like a glove!

This seems to be the best place to ask, so here goes:  Ifg anyone uses IRC here have they heard of the Bitlbee program? If so has anyone got it working with citadel chat?   I sometime chat to my facebook friends from my IRC client using Bitlbee, it works really well. Facebook uses xmpp/jabber protocol as does citadel, just wondered if there was an easy way to get it working with bitlbee ( i see in the docs people use pidgin to instant mesage there citadel friends Bitlbee would be cool.

Nice one.  I see what you did there.

B)

And, it is even IANA approved!

Mon May 26 2014 11:02:33 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Yes, that simple. Connect to port 504 and chocolate is dispensed over the wire.

So it's as easy as that! :/ I just gotta write a client that can speak the Citadel protocol and i get the chocolates? :P

As IG said, clients are like a box of chocolates.   I know folks that have written their own or modified the existing ones.

just one request if and when public newsgroups become avialable: comp.os.cpm  

<grovel>

Oh yeah!!! nearly forgot! Someoen mentioned that NNTP was in the works, if thats true what newsgroups will be available on uncensored?

If i change form logging in to logging on - will i get here any quicker?

Pretty cool! B)  I can see all the help dot commands and easily see their second keypress. I notice it's pretty easy to get to rooms aswell without all the typing B) . 

So "Save the Text Client" is a misnomer right? It seems it doesn't need to be saved, it's well used still by alot of people? I see that a packet radio network covering, what looks like, the whole of Minnesotta is using citadel and the text client which is great.

Is the text client still a stand alone BBS or do you do the admin dirty work via citserver (BBS that is not email, like handling user accounts etc)?

I could set up a citadel installation with just citserver and the text client then, i take it? B)

The one thing i like about the menu system BBS is that it is a full screen UI - so each room/conversation thread etc i can see as i would on a web forum - and even navigate much quicker than a web forum very large rooms/convo's - ( like going to a specific message, percentage of messages etc - and also doing regex type searches) . How do you search a large volume of messages like this with the text client?

Yes i think your right, i'm just getting used to it.

Citadel you mean?

Yes i can understand that, mono took me a while to get my head round even with a little time. It's just so different to anything else i have seen.

I hope no-one took it the wrong way when i asked about a second text client on a citadel installation? I was curious to know whether you could even have an alternative text client. The citadel bbs/text client is very good indeed, its super-fast and easy to navigate, and has a great history, and is a modern forum for a very forward looking bunch of people - it seems.

If i had got an account on this citadel way back i might not have such a menu fetish? :)

Mon May 12 2014 11:31:43 EDT from fleeb @ Uncensored

Yeah, that was the problem... grrr... they do a really good job of keeping out the spam. So good, I forget to check it if I don't get a message.

fleeb: you might be interested in the discussion on mono about there emails ending up in googles spam folder.

From the main menu ( Esc-g from anywhere on the bbs ) use the 'keypath': <IDU> to read the discussion.

The head admin voiced his concerns that their mail was sending up in gmail spam folders, and a few others have added their comments, the last one as of now is from the main author of the 'new account script'.

Another person posted a good link for this type of issue:  http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code/

Interesting! I was going to tell them about another BBS that knows a thing or two about email actually ;)

Doh!  yeah mine too! :) So there is nothing wrong with their account creation script!

If you send a 'chase mail' to monoadm@mono.org, they should sort it out. maybe your message was missed or mis-tagged as spam ?

just left a message with the head admin (who is online atm). He should sort it out. I honestly can't remember how long the account process takes, so it might just be a matter of waiting a bit.

I have just logged into mono  ( ssh mono@mono.org ),  as a guest.  And to create a new account pressed "g" in the main menu (after pressing "c" a few times to accept user policy and 'continue') i have created a new account and am awaiting my password via email.   How did you go about creating a new account?  If there is a problem i will let them know so someone can fix it.

I imagine it might not be useful to any seasoned citadel users, but its something i would find handy.

The text client is very good and i can navigate pretty well with it;  i have been using a bbs with a menu system for a while now and have grown to like it.

Thu May 08 2014 00:14:13 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Save the text client seems about right. There is a new room
"software" too. ;)

Save The Text Client it is, then :)

<pinches _arm&looks_around@new_surroundings>  Wow!

Just noticed that this had drifted over from "Hardware".

I am playing about with a clone of a popular BBS in the UK* ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_BBS ) - named Mconv (or mbbs which is the stand alone bbs system).

And i would love to be able to access citadel via a menu based system like this. Is the possibility of having another text client connect to citserver a good idea?

*(If anyone wants to see the actual monochome bbs in action they can ssh to: mono@mono.org )

+2 alpine, but I do miss nail (slackware).

Wed May 07 2014 01:19:39 PM EDT from the_mgt @ Uncensored

+1 for (Al)pine

+1 for (Al)pine

+1 for pine and  sdf.org

I mainly use webmail everywhere else at the moment. I have only been online (and owning/knowing howto switch on a computer)  since 2007 i think. And it took a couple of years to realize i could ditch the overweight monster email clients that come with most operating systems. Using a text client like pine was a revelation! B)

I recently started to reread a bit of the book i first bought to get my bearings with the internet, which was: Ed Krols 1992 "Whole internet users guide and catalog" . He statrs off with the unix "mail" client program (before going onto Pine/a mime client), but referenced another mail system before moving on "if you wanna learn more about email etc...": nameky the mh mail system.

Anyone use the MH system in any variation?

Save the text client seems about right. There is a new room "software" too. ;)

Future!! \o/

"Pick a room: Any room!" :P

Furure? Citdrift!! ?? Tell Tell!  :P

I always liked pine better than mutt.  Seems more intuitive to me.

Yeah you are right bbs = the people not the UI. 

UI wise i like the menu system - it seems you can never get lost even with a very large amount of content. And i just got my fingers round it. :)

Btw I like webcit as it is, i wouldn't want to try and turn it into something else. It's great!

Having a mono-like board as a text client however sounds nice though :) 

monochrome's website is only an info page - the monochrome bbs is only reachable through telnet/SSH - its still a traditional bbs that has grown form a simple pascal menu oriented program in 1987 by David Brownlee at City University London. It has been online to the masses (non-university spods) since the early 90's, once having a large usebase before such things as livejournal (their journaling/diary system is nice :) ), twitter and facebook came on the scene, aswell  as the ubiquitous web forums.

Its still a thriving community, if somewhat smaller, and the bbs system is still very good, very easy to navigate and full of potential. I'm suprised i have never seen another menu tyope system like it (maybe gopher?). It also looks greta on my smartphone and is a doddle to use with that.

You have to look around the bbs, stricly off limits to http and anything google:

ssh mono@mono.org

There are 5 user on now, there can be 20+ on during the day, at the  same time- most people are in and out after reading or posting to their fave boards etc.

Loads of games on there too text adventures and whatnot and there are a few muds you can access (telnet is also a menu object/type/thingey),  they have thier own annimation langauge which provides the graphics/banners and lots besides (more games whatnots).

It has alot in common - community -wise with sdf.org another long standing community on the net, but it has just kept to being a BBS.

----------------------------------------------------x---------------------------------------------------------------

Some people wrote perl and php stuff to access a Citadel. Look around through the wiki.

 

Btw Thanks ! I'll start reading!

So the citadel text client/bbs, is exactly that--a client - and not needed for citserver?  Ah !  And citadel is written in C and has an API(s) (whatever they are :) ) so you could have a second text client?  I thought that the text client was some underlying framework that some of the other stuff was dependant on maybe, for some reason. lol

Could you, in good faith, call Citadel a Citadel if it used another txt client?

mono is great! Having a copy of the clone is good to understand how it ticks :) .

I was wondering if you could easily have more than one User Interface on a citadel bbs? I know any long standing users of citadel would find it hard to switch maybe, but i'm not aq long standing user of citadel or mono bbs systems and i can zip round mono in a few keypresses (they reference boards by their "keypaths" so the ones you use are easy to get too by pressing all the keys at once).  It has alot of great features! 

I might try citadel on a Pi first then, i have seen mention on the wiki that a few people run citadel on Rasp Pi's.

hm, I must admit i'd rather use mutt to read mails on a terminal...

I suppose you could write your own text client.  I know someone who has :-)

Oh! I see! I had to ask after seeing someone using the text client on their phone.

Well we can still access the mail system so it's still very useful without the groupware features.

How do you work with calendar data and contacts via the text client? It shows only the type of data when i have looked at it, but not the actual appointment etc/or contact.

Just wandering through. I think editing of messages is required for some, but it is not a bad idea having "think first write once" functionality: stroke of genius infact!  B)

Wed Dec 18 2013 14:00:20 EST from Freakdog @ Dog Pound BBS II

I like the idea too. As you said, if you see Citadel as a BBS and/or
forum, it would make sense. But it is based on emails.

IGgy can correct me, but I believe you have it reversed, the_mgt. It's a BBS that has been extended to include Groupware functionality...disable the SMTP, POP3 and IMAP ports, and what do you have?

A mail server that is only sending to and receiving from itself? ;P

I know that the history is like you described, but I guess technically it is all mail today. Besides, were the old BBS's editable?

Don't get me wrong, for a real forum/BBS room, I would like an edit feature to clean out typos, etc. , too. But knowing the little time the devs atm have for such features, I'd not expect it in any 8.x release.

My main point was btw to get the requesting person to relax. We all want our favorite features implemented ASAP, but most people ask for this in a polite way.

I like the idea too. As you said, if you see Citadel as a BBS and/or forum, it would make sense. But it is based on emails.

On the other hand, fb and twatter do not let you edit (in a large style) either, from what I heard.

Most of Citadel is actually an email server. Would you request Gmail to enable editing of mails that were sent to you or that you sent out to others? Does that even make sense?

Now, I can understand the wish to be able to edit wiki or blog posts, calendars and the notes/tasks. But emails?

On a side note: This is a project driven by a small bunch of developers, it does what it does and it does not do what it does not. The devs might add new features on request, but in order to do that, they need to find the time and motivation to do so. Nagging and ranting is probably not something that kicks off motivation a lot in open source projects.

Speaking of open source: That is this trend were people have open repositories of the code, which can even be downloaded, modified and if working, patches are allowed to be send back. That is not everyones favorite workflow, but it is pretty much what you get from a free open source project.

Another thing is the packaging (addressed in another post): If distros feel free to package software, they are the ones responsible for it. I am running Citadel on Redhat and Gentoo, both are community provided packages, both mostly the latest versions. I have not heard of or had any runtime issues on these systems. If Ubuntu chose to pull the crappiest running version from somewhere, roll it up and provide it to their users, it is up to them to fix it.

tldr: Holiday season at the end of the year is coming up, be kind and stop screaming, please. Cheers!

I'd like to subscribe to the mailing list for this room.

With all due respect to webcit part of it, the real problems we are having seem to be resolvable through text client, at least as it currently stands.

We need bulk operations in many cases.

Thanx in advance.

This message has to do with the ability to edit the posts.

Why do you need to "save" the text client?

I thought that the text client is merely the interface to the citserver in that it can execute any and all operations available to citadel server.

Am I missing something?

As far as I can see, that interface is the best way to interact with the server even from webcit, which has all sorts of issues.

It is like an API. It is either you call the kernel or internals directly from webcit for example, which is bizarre of an idea, or you call it via the interface, which, in this case, would be a "text client".

Here is the real problem we have:

We need to edit the posts. It is simply a must. On our system everything counts, down to the last dot and comma. Because what is posted is a result of a flood of information that comes from the sources "above", and I would prefer we don't get into this.

Which means that when information comes, you better "hold on to your seed" in order not to miss some of it. It is like a switch: "transmission started", and then "transmission ended". If you can not type fast enough, even if you are the fastest typist in the world, you will INEVITABLY miss some things.

As a result, there are many syntax errors in the text. Secondly, when you review the text to correct those errors, you may recover some of the information that was missed during the flood.

So, what we need is the ability to EDIT the posts.

It seems that from the webcit it is not possible to edit the posts.

In that case, the text client could theoretically be used if we can recover, for example, the entire room need be, in the SMTP/NNTP message format, then hand edit the messages, then repost them to the room overriding the original messages. But the time stamps can not change. That is the condition. Because the message sequencing is important in our case.

So... What do we do? Can it be done?

I was sent to this room as an insult it seems, like if you talk garbage like this, then you deserve to be sent to the room of "resurrecting the text client" where all the plague victims gather, only if that guy knew WHO is he sending and where. But that is "besides the point" I guess. Right?

So, the bottom line is: how do I edit the posts, "text client", heaven or hell?

Mon Nov 11 2013 10:28:17 PM EST from zooer @ Uncensored

So when is that latest text-client going to be available somewhere? The one that knows what https: and the Who list is and randomly
makes angry statements about Obama, Microsoft and facebook.

When you write it.  I took a peek at the code already (pre-split codebase).  Tag, you are it.

Not only that, but it now has the ability to encrypt everything using ROT26 in real time.

Fri Oct 11 2013 07:29:23 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

The problem is that *I* have been dormant for the last year or so. Work has gotten so out of control that I don't have nearly the amount of time I used to for Citadel. :(

Gotcha IG.  Thank you for keeping the torch.  I understand your dilemma with life and passions, and hope things work out well.  I appreciate your work.  

Ax25

Fri Oct 04 2013 22:08:19 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

If you search through it twice aster the while statement and using
searchptr = strstr(searchptr, "https://");
will that take too many resources or is there a quicker more efficient method?

It has been so long since I

looked at C code.

dothebart will disagree with me on this, but my opinion is that at this scale, cpu cycles are cheap.

So I've made a change to the client code. No telling how long it'll take before that code falls into your eager hands, but it's checked into the tree so you'll get it eventually. :)

It now starts with an array containing "http://" "https://" and "ftp://" and runs through the message searching for each of those prefixes.

Share And Enjoy.

Oh, I actually implemented something similar for the RSS-Client so twitter feeds would become more usefull; it would look up those tiny urls and expand them. Usefull since you wouldn't have to click the cat in the box anymore, being able to distinguish whether you already knew that URL or not.

however, while it was easy to do with the old model of one thread being busy with everything automated in a line, it would have become hell complicated with the event driven model,

and since that feature wasn't released yet, and twitter changed the rss'abilities it never saw a public release.

Tue Oct 01 2013 19:10:16 EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

/* sloppy slide them all down, hey it's the client, who cares. :-) */



I CARE damn it!

send diffs! or pay fleeb a beer to do it ;-P

the editor runs wherever your client runs. if its on your local box, then its run there; if you ssh in its on the server.

the citadel versioning scheme is:

x.yz

X - major new features

Y - evolutional new features

z - bugfix releases.

There currently is no citadel client .deb yet because of I didn't have the time to care for moving the scripts around.

However Feivel (our debian maintainer & uploader) has already done it, so you should be able to download & compile his work:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/citadel-client

Sun Sep 29 2013 10:41:48 AM EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

I tried the suggested and it told me that a library was not satisfiable. There is no pleasing some libraries.
I am going going back to what I do. "It works, why f*<k with it"

Sorry to hear about that.  I guess I have been doing an "easy_install" build of it for years on both the client and server ends.  I am not sure if you can do an easy_install build of just the client (but that would be a good thing to have added to the easy installer)!

Sat Sep 28 2013 11:08:01 AM EDT from dothebart @ Uncensored

 

btw, for the ease of porting etc. with 8.20 the text client got its own package.

So we're waiting for the mingw port of the citclient from any of you ;-)

Does that even run under Wine (mingw)? :-)

Thu Sep 26 2013 23:25:58 EDT from ax25 @ Uncensored

Thu Sep 26 2013 10:47:00 PM EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

So, did the NSA ask you guys to put a back-door in the text-client?

Probably not.  Have you read the code?  I have (although not recently).  I love the fact it is available and I can figure out subtle issues when I take the output and send it out via a whole different networking technology (packet radio).  That makes it (not easy), but not impossible to debug edge cases.

You should read the client code, it is fairly short and at least the last time I checked, compares well to some other networking client code I have looked at in the past.

btw, for the ease of porting etc. with 8.20 the text client got its own package.

So we're waiting for the mingw port of the citclient from any of you ;-)

Fri Sep 27 2013 11:43:47 EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

 Have you read the code?

I was joking.... but who is to say the same code I read is the same code that is running on the server. The NSA is
tricky.

who knows? maybe your compiler universaly adds backdoors...

Fri Sep 27 2013 11:43:47 AM EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

 Have you read the code?

I was joking.... but who is to say the same code I read is the same code that is running on the server. The NSA is
tricky.

Oh, I was talking about the client code.  I can't vouch for the Uncensored code :-)

Thu Sep 26 2013 10:47:00 PM EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

So, did the NSA ask you guys to put a back-door in the text-client?

Probably not.  Have you read the code?  I have (although not recently).  I love the fact it is available and I can figure out subtle issues when I take the output and send it out via a whole different networking technology (packet radio).  That makes it (not easy), but not impossible to debug edge cases.

You should read the client code, it is fairly short and at least the last time I checked, compares well to some other networking client code I have looked at in the past.

Thu Sep 19 2013 08:51:00 PM EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

zooer@Linux12:~$ citadel
Can't connect: No such file or directory

zooer@Linux12:~$ citadel --version
Can't connect: Connection timed out

zooer@Linux12:~$ citadel --help
Can't connect: Connection timed out

zooer@Linux12:~$ citadel -?
Can't connect: Connection timed out

le sigh

7.86-1

Zooer, give the text client v8.11 a try (at least it works against my 8.20 install).