CompuServe Messages

Marion, One of the differences between GEnie and CIS is the underlying philosophy to the system. This is reflected in how they each handle the message base and is not a reflection in the amount of work that a sysop expends on his/her forum. If you really look, your proposal would at least double the number of machines that CIS needs to manage the service and probably triple the number of drives required to maintain these messages adinfinitum. To give you an example. We recently had a small problem with library 9 in this forum. It's now fixed and the main cause of the problem was discovered. Library 9 used over 270,000 file blocks to hold it's contents and it simply was too big. To give you some indication as to the size of library 9 at that time, each file block is approximately 512 bytes, which means that Library 9 was 135,000k or 135 megabytes at the time of the failure. (CIS now recommends that we keep the libraries from exceeding 200,000 blocks or 100 megs.) To put this into a total perspective, we have a possibility of having 100 megs of files in each of the forum's 18 libraries or close to 2 gigabytes of files for each forum. And there are over 400 active forums on CIS presently. That adds up to a lot of potential storage just for the libraries. Now when you add a non-deleting message base to that (specially at the scroll rate that this forum runs), you can really get into some BIG numbers for the storage that would be necessary. And the really amazing thing is that the ACAD and ASOFT forums (though they are in the top 100) are no where near the scroll rate of the most active forums on CIS. We have some section leaders on these forums who we call TM's or Thread Masters. One of the jobs of a TM is to gather the interesting threads in his speciality and archive them in the forum libraries. I will admit that this hasn't been done as well as it should or could have been. And maybe we need a coupla interested people from this forum to help out with this. But all is not lost. When you had your comm problem during the ice storm, you may not have been able to read the replies to your request, but they weren't dropped into the bit bucket. ALL UNREAD MESSAGES posted to a specific UID are scrolled to the mail box assigned to that UID rather than being lost. So the replies you didn't get a chance to read would be in your CIS mail box. Did you check there ??? Did you get an announcement when loging into CIS that you have waiting MAIL ??? Did you switch CIS accounts ???? Incidentally, the sysops of this forum aren't paid (unless you wish to consider the Autodesk employees weekly paychecks, or the fact that while they are working on this forum, the TM's don't have to pay connect charges while managing the message base or working in the libraries as payment). I personally have been working and sysoping in the Autodesk forums since 1989 or before the original ADESK forum split into ACAD, ASOFT and ARETAIL. In all that time I have never received a penny from either Autodesk or Compuserve (though I did get a coupla Autodesk shirts for the booth work at AEC in Dallas…<g>). I have been given the use of the particular UID that I now access the service with, so I guess you can say that in a sense I am being paid, as it is a system wide free flag. The only problem is that I don't have the time to troll the system, cause I gotta be here typing these stupid messages…….<grin>. Are we having fun yet ???? BTW. If you really need the answers (replies) to your original request, I got about 100 megs of compressed messages from ACAD and ASOFT that I could search………just call me packrat…..I save everything from the forums.