CompuServe Thread

Greg, We presently have 547 messages on the board. This will vary according to the type of traffic we have. Reasons are that the message board software was changed this last year and the way message slots are calculated and used was changed. We presently have about 750 message slots, but the new slot is used differently than the old slot. The first (or earliest) message on the board uses four slots. One for the sender, second for the recipient, third for the subject and the fourth for the message itself. The first reply to this message (provided that it's between the same two people) only uses one other slot, and that's for the reply itself. If a third member were to reply to this original message, that reply would use two slots. One for the new name and one for the message. What this all boils down to is that everyone involved in the message board has one message slot for his (or her) name. Each thread had a message slot for the subject and finally each message itself also occupies one message slot. Are you confused yet ????? If not, follow along…….<grin>. To further confuse everything there are two files that make up the message base. The first is the index file that contains the header (message number, date, subject, sender and recipient). It also contains a pointer to a specific location within the second file. This is the file that you see when you do a Quick Scan of the board. The second file is the message file itself and contains the body of each message. When you do a READ of the message board, the CIS computers combine the first and second files in the proper order to give you the complete message that you see on the screen. The new software (it's also the software that has increased the message size from 2600 characters to 10,000 characters) also handles the scrolls to MAIL much better than the older stuff. As a result, we don't have to do a scrub of the message board so often. (lots of forums have completely eliminated message board scrubs). But when a message scrolls to mail, two things happen. The CIS software creates a new index file for the mailed message and inserts the "Message scrolled from the Autodesk Software forum" into the subject section of the index. If the recipient is on the basic plan, the MAIL software will prepend "+postage due+" to this subject line. But most importantly, the forum software will also add the line "The following message was scrolled to you from the Autodesk Software forum" (or some such words…cause I can't remember the exact wording right now) to the body of the message too. If you don't see this line, or something similar to it at the beginning of the body of the message, you haven't received a "Scrolled to MAIL" message. If all you get is the scroll announcement in the index subject line, what you have is a reply from a message that was scrolled to someone else. What normally happens is that you respond to a message on the forum. The person you have responded to doesn't pick up his messages and your response scrolls to mail for him. He does pick it up there because he's alerted to the fact that he has mail waiting (and some of the automated programs will get any waiting mail as part of the program). He reads the response you had posted on the message board here AND HE REPLIES. But he's now replying in MAIL, and his reply will contain the subject of the message which is the scroll announcement in the index. One thing this thread had done however, JP and I reviewed the message slot and usage of the board this morning. We presently have about a 4.5 day scroll here on ASOFT. Since we're permitted a mininum of a 7 day scroll, JP has requested additional message slots for this board.