8BS64: Messaging System Info

Version 2.11

by Steven Flintham (15A)

Introduction

The messaging system is designed to
allow 8BS members to send both
messages for publication in the disc
magazine and private messages to each
other.

Members use the program to write their
messages which they can then send in
to the editor on their submission
disc. He then uses a separate program
which helps to sort all the messages
out ready for inclusion in the
magazine.

Basic instructions

This section describes the main
features of the program and should
contain sufficient information to
allow you to use it successfully, even
if you miss out on some of the more
advanced features.

Inserting your submission disc

When the program is run, it asks you
to insert your submission disc in
drive 0. The message asking you to do
this is rather complicated but
unfortunately this is unavoidable due
to the different filing systems
available.

If your submission disc in in DFS
format you should press D, while if it
is in ADFS format you should press A.
If you are not sure, pressing SPACE
will almost certainly work.

You should leave the submission disc
in the drive at all times, unless
instructed otherwise by the program.
You should also avoid pressing BREAK
while the program is running, although
it is safe to do so when the main menu
is being shown.

It may be obvious but please remember
that you do not have to write all your
messages at the same time. As they are
stored on disc, you can come back to
them at a later time and change them,
write new ones etc.

Entering your user ID and name

If you have not previously used this
disc to store messages you will be
asked to enter your user ID and name.
Your user ID is shown in the top left
hand corner of the main 8BS menu.

You can just press RETURN instead of
entering your name if you wish to
remain anonymous. If you do enter your
name, it will appear in messages
exactly as you type it so you should
type (for example)

Steven Flintham

rather than

STEVEN FLINTHAM

Don't worry if you make a mistake, as
you can change these later.

After this you will be asked how many
messages you wish to be able to store
in the message file. The higher this
value is, the more disc space the
message file will occupy.

Note that at present there is no way
to change the size of the message file
once you have created it; this will be
rectified in the near future. You
should therefore be careful to make
sure there is enough room for all the
messages you wish to send.

The program will then create a new
message file on the disc, which may
take some time.

The main menu

After entering your user ID and name
if necessary the main menu will
appear. The highlighted bar shows the
currently selected option.

You can choose an option by either
pressing the letters shown at the
right hand edge of the screen or using
the up and down cursor keys. When you
have highlighted an option, pressing
RETURN will confirm your choice.

You can usually return to the main
menu by pressing ESCAPE if you get
stuck anywhere else in the program.

Writing a new message

To start writing a new message, choose
the "Start a new message" option from
the main menu. You will be asked for
the user ID to send the message to.
There are three possibilites.

Firstly, you can enter the user ID of
an individual member to send a private
message to them. For instance,
entering 15A would send the message to
me.

Secondly, you can enter the 'fake'
user ID CCC to send in a comment on a
program or article you have seen in
the magazine. This will appear on the
magazine disc, usually in the
'Reactor' section.

Thirdly, you can enter the 'fake' user
ID 999 to send a general message to
everyone. These messages appear in the
magazine and can contain anything
suitable for an 8BS issue.

A common mistake is to enter the ID of
an individual member when you want to
comment publicly on a program or
article they have written. Only
messages to CCC or 999 will appear in
the magazine.

Once you have entered the user ID and
pressed RETURN the main editing screen
will appear.

The message editor

The message editor is used to edit
both new and old messages. If you are
writing a new message, the cursor will
be placed on the subject line, ready
for you to enter the subject.

The subject can be anything you like
but you should keep it fairly short
(preferably one line, although it is
up to you) and it should summarise the
message you are sending.

If you want to make several unrelated
points, you are probably best to send
in several separate messages rather
than to put them all in one very long
message. This makes it easier for
people reading your messages to see
what they are about.

The message editor is a bit like a
wordprocessor, although there are
several important differences.

Pressing RETURN will move you down
onto the next line, as you would
expect, and as you type words which
don't quite fit at the end of lines
will be moved automatically onto the
next line.

You can use the cursor keys to move
around the message and whatever you
type will appear at the cursor, as in
a wordprocessor.

When you reach the bottom of the
screen, either by typing or by using
the cursor keys, it will scroll to
allow you to continue. There is a
limit to the length of a message but
this should not be a problem. If you
run up against the limit you should
consider rewriting the message as a
complete article.

As you move the cursor about, you may
notice that there is a space at the
left of each line which apparently has
nothing in. You can type over this but
you are recommended not to. No harm
will result if you do, but the
colouring of your message may change.

The DELETE key works almost as normal
but you cannot DELETE back past the
start of a line as you can in some
wordprocessors. If you delete words in
the middle of a paragraph, the words
from the next line will not move up to
fill in the space.

CTRL

inserts a space after the

cursor, moving the rest of the line
over, but as with DELETE, words at the
edge of the screen will just be pushed
off the edge rather than moved onto
the next line.

This is provided as anything you type
replaces whatever is at that point on
the screen, rather than moving it
automatically to the right as most
wordprocessors would do.

This behaviour is a bit inconvenient
but it is almost unavoidable for
technical reasons.

You can delete lines and close up the

gap by pressing CTRL

f8.

CTRL

inserts a blank line above the

current line. Careful use of these
keys means that the problem with

DELETE and CTRL

is not so serious.

You can change the colour of the text

by pressing

f0-f6.

These insert

special 'invisible' characters into
the text which change the colour from
that point to the end of the line.
They appear as spaces, so you can use
them instead of spaces if you want to
change the colour of a word.

The gap at the beginning of each line
contains one of these characters,
which are automatically put in when
you press RETURN or when a word is
moved onto the next line.

If you move over the gap and press a
colour key the colour of that line
will change. If you change the colour
at the far left of a line as you type
it, new lines will appear in that
colour without you having to change
them afterwards.

This all sounds a bit complicated but
if you experiment for a while it
should all become clear. If you have
ever used a teletext editor you should
feel fairly comfortable with the
message editor straight away, although
it has been written to be a bit more
like a wordprocessor than most
teletext editors.

An important point to bear in mind is
that if you simply type over the
recipient's ID at the top of the

message, that will

not

change the

recipient. You must also press

SHIFT

and type in the new ID when

asked.

The ID of the person who will actually
receive the message is always shown on
the bottom line of the screen when you
are editing a message. You should
ensure that this is the same as the ID
at the top of the message.

If you find this confusing, simply
take care to enter the correct user ID
when first starting a new message and
don't change the ID at the top of the
message.

When you are happy with the message,
press ESCAPE to leave the editor and
save the message to disc.

Viewing, editing, deleting and

printing existing messages

To examine any messages you have
already written, choose the
view/edit/print option from the main
menu. There may be a short delay but
another menu will soon appear showing
all the messages you have created.

Each line in the menu begins with the
user ID to which it will be sent and
then has as much of the subject line
as will fit.

As with the main menu, you can use the
up and dowm cursor keys to move the
highlight. There are no other keys you
can press to move the highlight on
this menu.

If there are too many messages to fit
on one screen, there will be a "More
messages..." option at the bottom of
the menu. Moving the highlight onto
this and pressing RETURN will show
another page of messages.

When you have highlighted a message
there are several options.

You can press V or RETURN to view the
message. If the message is very long,
you can use the up and down cursor
keys to scroll through it. Pressing
ESCAPE will return you to the list of
messages. Thanks to Chris Richardson
for allowing me to use some of the
machine code from his teletext editor
here.

You can press E to edit the message.
This allows you to change any parts of
it which you are not happy with. You
will be asked if you are sure and if
you press Y the message editor will
appear with the message in it waiting
to be changed. Pressing ESCAPE will
leave the message editor as usual,
save the message and return you to the
list of messages.

You can press P to print the message.
You will be asked if you are sure and
if you press Y the message will be
printed and then the list of messages
will be displayed again.

You can press D to delete the message.
You will be asked if you are sure and
if you press Y the message will be
deleted. You can get it back again
using the undelete option from the
main menu, described later, but you
should try not to rely on this too
much.

Pressing ESCAPE when the list of
messages is shown will return you to
the main menu, without doing anything
to the message which is currently
highlighted.

Printing all the messages

If you want to print all the messages,
rather than printing a few
individually as described in the
previous section, you can choose the
"Print all the messages" option from
the main menu.

You will be asked if you are sure you
want to print the messages and
printing will only start if you press
Y.

You can press ESCAPE while the
messages are being printed and the
computer will stop. However, if you
have a large printer buffer printing
may continue - this is unavoidable.

Re-entering your user ID and name

Choosing the "Re-enter your user
ID/name" options allows you to correct
any errors you made when you were
first asked for your user ID and name.

You will be shown your user ID and
name in turn and you can DELETE either
of them and type in a new version or
just press RETURN to leave them as
they are.

Note that if you do change them, the

change will

not

affect any messages

created previously, so if the change
is important you should go back and
edit all of the old messages
individually.

This is tedious but unavoidable. In
practice, there is no problem as this
option is very rarely used.

Provided you check your user ID and
name carefully when you first enter
them or when you come to create your
first message then correcting them
will not be too difficult and you will
only have to edit one message at most.

Undeleting messages

If you have accidentally deleted a
message which you wanted to keep you
can probably recover it by choosing
"Undelete deleted messages" from the
main menu. The sooner you do this
after deleting the message the more
likely it is that you will be
successful as new messages may replace
deleted messages. Once this has
happened you cannot undelete the
message.

The program will go through the
message file and every time it finds a
deleted message it will show you the
recipient's ID and the subject and ask
you if you want to undelete it. As
usual, press Y for yes or N for no.
This is repeated for all the deleted
messages found.

If you undelete a message then it will
appear in the message list the next
time you view the messages.

Leaving the program

To leave the program, you can either
choose "Quit" from the main menu or
press BREAK when the main menu is
displayed.

More advanced editing features

This section describes some of the
more advanced features of the message
editor. The 'advanced' heading is not
meant to suggest that they are harder
to use, simply that new users can
ignore them to begin with.

Teletext control codes can seem quite
complicated at first and although no
harm will be done by experimenting,
users with no previous experience
might like to experiment with a proper
teletext editor first.

As it's main purpose it to edit text,
the message editor is not as helpful
as a teletext editor when using more
advanced teletext control codes. A
good teletext editor will have
instructions which will explain what
the various features mentioned here do
and how to use them.

and

insert flashing and steady

control codes. Flashing should be used
sparingly - if you have to highlight a
word or phrase, colouring it
differently is probably better.

SHIFT

and SHIFT

insert coloured

and black background codes. These work
in conjunction with the colour codes.

CTRL

and CTRL

insert double and

single height codes. Double height is
not very well supported and you must
enter each line separately. It should
not be overused as large areas of
double height will look strange when
put in a scrolling display.

There is some support for teletext

graphics. CTRL

f0-f6

insert graphics

colour codes into the message

and

enters a pixel toggling mode in

which Q, W, A, S, Z and X toggle the 6
pixels of a teletext graphics

character. Press

again to exit

pixel toggling mode.

CTRL

and CTRL

insert contiguous

and separated graphics codes, which
allow you to change the style of
graphics.

CTRL

and CTRL

insert hold and

release graphics codes, which allow
you to overcome some of the problems
with colour codes taking up a space on
the screen.

If you wish to prepare messages
outside the messaging system using a
wordprocessor or text editor, you can
either use the ASC2Mes program or use
the message editor's simpler CTRL-T
command.

This will ask you to insert the disc
containing the message, which may be
the same as the submission disc
(although bear in mind the earlier
warning for DFS users) and enter the
filename of the message.

It will then be read in at the current
cursor position and when it has
finished you will be asked to insert
your submission disc again and the
editor screen will reappear.

The file is checked to see if it
exists but if you enter invalid
characters in the filename the program
may crash. This is hard to prevent but
at the very most you will lose the
message you were working on. As you
were presumably going to be reading
most of it in from disc, you should
lose very little work.

The message you are reading in should
be either unformatted text or text
formatted to a width of 38 characters.

You can produce unformatted text by
writing it in Wordwise (Plus) without

using

any

control codes and saving it

using option 1 from the main menu or
by writing it in Edit on a Master and
ignoring the way words split at the
ends of lines.

If you use View, you can probably
produce formatted text by setting the
ruler length appropriately and using a
spool utility to spool the text out to
disc.

Memory requirements

The program uses quite a lot of memory
but in tests with PAGE at &1D00 it
appeared to run correctly. This means
that most people should be able to run
it without any memory difficulties. If
you experience problems, try disabling
any extension ROMs which raise PAGE or
(on a BBC B or B+) try using DFS
instead of ADFS.

The program will give warnings and
advise you to restart it when memory
gets low. These should not normally
appear, but they may do if you use the
program continuously for a long time.

Reporting problems

If you have any problems with the
messaging system please let me know.
The more information you can supply
about the problem, the more likely it
is that I can fix it.

You should try turning the computer
off, disabling any extra ROMs etc
before running the program to see if
that solves the problem - if it does
then the program is incompatible with
some feature of your system. If you
can track down the incompatibility I
will be pleased to try and cure it.

It would be very helpful if you would
start from a completely blank disc and

attempt to reproduce the error

in as

few operations as possible.

That way

it is easier to tell which part of the
program contains the error.

For instance, if you only had to use
the New message and View/edit/print
options, then the problem must be in
one of those parts of the program.

You should also give me full details
of your system, including any extra
ROMs you have fitted, the filing
system and type of disc drive being
used. It would also be helpful if you
could do a *MAP on the disc you were
using and tell me what results you
obtain.

If you get an error message, please
let me know what it was - in
particular, the line number is very
important. If you have renumbered the
program, please try to reproduce the
problem on an original copy.

I would also like to know the value of
PAGE on your machine - type PRINT
~PAGE from BASIC to discover this.