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Ärende: FidoNews 30:12 [02/06]: General Articles
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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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                    Moving the Tyz flags
                    By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555
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Did anyone notice last Friday's relatively large nodediff? (12K
instead of the usual average 2K)

The reason is that over 300 nodes that carried an On Line Times Flag,
moved them from the user flag field to the regular flag field.

Due to a clerical error the online time flags (Tyz) were erroneously
documented in the first version of FTS-5001 (1999) in such a way that
it could be read as if they are user flags. This was corrected in
version 2 (2005), where they are documented as regular flags, as they
should be. They are regular flags, not user flags because they are
meant to be read by mailers to determine when they may call out.
Unfortunately not all coordinators updated their flag checking
software. In Z2 the Tyz flags were only accepted as user flags until
August 2012.

So why this sudden large migration, seven month later? It is because
some discussion arose after publishing an update of FTS-5001 and that
made me remember I once wrote a tool to move all the Tyz flags in a
nodelist segment from the user flag field to the regular flag field.
It is already 8 years old, and I almost forgot about it, but now I dug
it up again and started aggressively promoting it. A quick survey
showed that Z2 is the playing field. In Z1 there are four Tyz flags,
only one of which is listed as a user flag and that one is possibly an
error as it is listed as "UTUG" instead of "U,TUG". Also the only
listed connection method for the node is by an e-mail protocol and
restricted on-line times do not make much sense for e-mail. In Z3 and
Z4 there are no Tyz flags at all. The Z2 segment of nodelist.074
showed 1043 Tyz flags, of which 119 were listed as regular flags and
924 as user flags. A gold mine. ;-)

So I netmailed all RC's in Z2 and also all NC's in Regions 45, 46 and
50 that had Tyz flags listed as user flags. The ones that I had a
direct connection with, got the program by file attach and the others
got pointers to where they could get it.

The result exceeded my hopes and expectations. By far! Between
nodelist.074 and nodelist.075, 100 flags moved from the user field to
the regular field. 96 of them in net 5030. So obviously NC5030 had
applied my tool to his segment. A few days later all of R46 made the
plunge. 169 flags in one night. By the end of the week nets 5022,
5061, 5085 and 6070 also made the change. Between nodelist.074 and
nodelist.081, 312 flags were moved from the user field to the regular
flag field in one week. More than 1/3 of the potential! Kudos to those
NCs and RCs.

Of course it won't stop here. After a decent period of silence I will
make another round in promoting my little tool. In the meantime if you
are an NC and you have Tyz flags listed as user flags in your segment,
here is where you can find CONVTYZ:

http://www.vlist.eu/downloads/ctyz100.zip

The archive contains the DOS executable and the (Borland C++) source
code. If anyone wants to port it to another platform, be my guest.


¸ Michiel van der Vlist, all rights reserved.
Permission to publish in the FIDONEWS file echo, the FIDONEWS dis-
cussion echo and the FNEWS_PUBLISH echo as originating from 2:2/2.


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