In a message dated 02 Jan 96  00:39:55, Mark Lewis wrote:

AW> Definitely.  To make a long story short, the reason I was given is
AW> that the FTSC doesn't want a lawsuit from the author or users of
AW> Tabby.

 ML>  what the hell is all this coming to?? Policy 4 states that
 ML> everyone will support, at a minimum, FTS-1 ... to file a lawsuit
 ML> because their software does not follow Policy 4 as required is generally
 ML> considered to be annoying and is grounds for dismissal from fidonet.

Agreed.  I personally find it annoying that I was given the runaround on
getting a node number because of it... 

 ML> who told you the above? tabby users have no special rights in fidonet.
 ML> nor does anyone else.

Basically an RC and a member of the FTSC when I filed a policy complaint...

I was hoping to avoid telling the long story, but...

A few years back when I attempted to join Fidonet (in a different region,
so don't think I'm talking about my current RC or NC [Hi Jerry!]), I
followed the "How to Join" section to the letter... set my self
up as 1:xxxx/999 and attempted to crashmail my local NC.  My transfer
didn't go because of protocol failures.  I attempted multiple times... all
of them failed.  Since he was the only node in my local net (how that was
pulled off, I'll never figure out), I dialed directly into his system and
left him a message to see if he could crashmail me to help test out the
problem to see if it really was my end.  No response... after more attempts
to get a hold of the NC, on a wild hair, I crashed the RC... *no* problems.
 Transfer went just fine, EMSI, FTS, WaZoo, whatever.  After more
hee-hawing around, the RC and I sat down and figured out that the Tabby
system was doing SEAlink (the only protocol at the time that my mailer
_didn't_ support) and only SEAlink transfers... enter in an FTSC
representative.

The FTSC rep checked out both systems and... bingo, the RC and I were
right.  TrapDoor (my mailer) was given the OK, but Tabby was *not*. [In
fact, they found a bug in InterMail's FTS-1 protocol handling because of
this episode!]  Tabby (at that time... maybe its been fixed?) *ONLY*
supported SEAlink.  No SEAlink, no connection.  

In the end, the RC and FTSC rep both agreed that there were too many Tabby
mailers out there to start yanking nodes away... and, to satisfy me, they
broke up the net and made us both regional independents.  After that
episode, the "net" grew to several nodes...


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