Moderation update
- From: Mark Goodge <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:37:39 +0100
As the saying goes, I have some good news and some bad news...
The good news is that the server is up and running again. In fact,
it's actually a new server, so it should be a lot more reliable than
before.
The bad news is that I couldn't get the original moderbot working
again. It's written in rexx, and I can't get rexx working on the new
system - for some reason, it just won't compile, and I don't know
enough about what's going wrong to be able to fix it.
However, a second bit of good news is that, before the system failure,
I had been working on an entirely new moderbot, written in PHP. So,
rather than try to solve the rexx problem, I've made the new system
live. And if you're reading this, then it's working!
The next bit of bad news, though, is that it's somewhat untested and
almost certainly contains bugs. I had intended to run it in parallel
with the old system, posting messages to a local newsgroup, until I
was happy that it was working well enough to go live. But I haven't
been able to do that, and I haven't completed a lot of the features
that I originally intended to add before switching over. So if things
are a bit erratic over the next few days (or weeks), you know why!
The other bit of bad news is that the new system uses a different
method of handling poster statuses, and I haven't been able to import
the data from the old system. So everyone is back on manual again for
their first post after the restart.
A couple of other things to note:
1. Everything posted prior to this message appearing (and that
includes the smart-alec replies from those of you who have seen the
test messages a few minutes ago - don't you have a life, for goodness
sake?) has been lost. Anything that you've posted that hasn't already
appeared will need to be reposted.
2. As an anti-spam feature, the new system requires a valid Newsgroups
line in any post by someone not already known to the moderation
system. Since that currently means all of you, this means that if
you've previously been posting by direct mail then you'll either need
to edit your email to add a Newsgroups line (easy enough with a decent
email program such as Thunderbird or Eudora), or make at least one
post via a news client in order to establish yourself on the system
before reverting to direct mail.
I'll post some more information about the new system once I'm happy
that it's working OK - there are some new features either already
built-in or under construction that should make things run a little
more smoothly.
For tonight and tomorrow, I'm not going to let the new moderbot run
automatically - instead, I'll run it manually every now and then when
I'm here to watch it so that I can see any errors as and when they
occur. That means nothing will get posted when I'm not at my desk, so
don't complain if your 3am post hangs around until after breakfast
before reaching the waiting world. Assuming nothing goes obviously
wrong (or nothing goes wrong that isn't easy to fix) I'll put it back
on auto at the weekend.
Mark
.
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