* EleBBS Support List

Hi Daryl, welcome to the EleBBS list. :)

>  I've been referred to EleBBS and the NetSerial program, but because
> of my setup, I'm still limited...even though I've been told that these
> legacy non-fossil doors will only work on comports 1 through 4.
> My setup has a  ham radio terminal node controller (TNC) for "packet"
> operation on comport 2,  and I have a PCI modem on comport 3 for
> dial-up callers (yes, I have a few of them). I can use NetSerial to create
> virtual comports 1 and 4...which  basically just leaves me 3 nodes to
> work with...where all callers could  use the fossil and non-fossil doors.

The COM1-COM4 limitation for non-fossil programs is a limitation of the NT
Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM) which is part of Windows.

>  I note that EleBBS allows the creation of message and file
"boards", with
> areas within them. But, I didn't see if it allowed doorgames...which is
> the big draw for BBS's. Plus, I'm not that "graphically inclined" to
> create a  bunch of fancy menus, etc. I noted a bunch of EleBBS URLs off
> of the PCMicro.Com NetSerial page, and have looked at them...but right
> now, it seems a bit much to digest.

EleBBS does support door games, and the biggest difference between
EleBBS and Synchronet is that EleBBS includes a menu editor which allows
you to customize any menu to use any hotkey to run any command.
(and you can even edit/test menus while you are logged on locally).

To add a door to any menu, you would edit that menu (eleconfig -m),
go to the menu you want the door to be located in, press INS to add a
new menu entry, press Enter to edit that new entry, and on the "action"
option press enter to select "type-7" under External- doors, exits).
Then move the cursor to the "display" option and press enter to enter
the text that should be displayed on the screen, or if your menu uses
either lightbars or a predrawn ANSI/ASC/RIP screen instead of drawing
each menu item then you should just put a ";" in the display field.
(a predrawn screen is used by having a separate menu option "type-40"
with the name of the textfile without the extension in the optdata field).)
Next you move the cursor to the "Optdata" option and press enter, and
here you enter the command line to run the doors batch file, like this:
c:\bbs\door\lord\lord.bat *N
(The *N gets replaced with the node number, so the lord.bat would see
%1 as being the node number since it was the first and only parameter
passed to the batch file)
Next you move the cursor to the "hotkey" option press enter and enter
the key that should cause the door to be run.
If you are using the default EleBBS menus you probably want to enable
the lightbar feature to work with your door entry... This is probably the
most difficult part for beginner EleBBS sysops. You need to enter the
X/Y position on the screen where the door text it should displayed,
and the text (and colors) to display when the lightbar is not currently
on this item (LowItem) and the text to display when the lightbar is
on this item (HighItem). There are command keys shown on the
bottom of the menu editor while editing the LowItem/HighItem entries,
such as F1=colors, F2=display Sample, F3=macros.

There is some additional info on the EleBBS Faq page under the
old Fossil drivers section:  http://pcmicro.com/elebbs/faq/fossil.html
and a lot more detail under the NetFoss section:
http://pcmicro.com/netfoss/elebbs.html but keep in mind that NetFoss
is *NOT* yet compatible with COM ports so it will not work with
NetSerial (yet). NetFoss requires additional information in the type-7
OptData line which is not needed by conventional fossil drivers.

Regards,  Mike

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