On 08 May 97, Joe Rowehl wrote to Trev Roydhouse:
 JR> The following items have been requested in the new release of Opus:
Joe, I noted your 8 items.
I have a few others items I would like to add.
1.  Very Important!  Fix the BUG that allows anyone who sees an online file 
to download it, regardless of their priv level or download priv of a 
particular files directory, or locks and keys to that area.  If a caller can 
see a file, they can download it.  The secret of how to do it?  Just make the 
files you want to download the 2nd or 3rd or 4th files is a batch download 
request. Opus WILL check - and deny - the first file in the queue if it sees 
the caller isn't supposed to be able to download that file - but the rest of 
the files will just sail right on through.  A particularly nasty bug if you 
happen to have adult files online, and you want callers to be able to see the 
file listings, but not download w/o age verification or a membership.  If 
they can see the file listings through the file titles command or the new 
files command - they can download any of them - if they know the secret!  
This needs to be fixed!
2.  I would like to see a "mini-editor" in Opus-Fam.  If you want to enter 
formatted file descriptions that are 6 or 7 lines long, you have to go 
through a lot of effort to do it now, as Opus-Fam has no built in support for 
long file descriptions.  An example of a formatted file description would be 
a 6 line file description in a high-ascii box.  Right now, I use a DOS editor 
and a template I created.  I format my file description in this little 
template, create a files.bbs line for the file with all line feeds removed 
from the long file description, than use the ^M functino of Opus-fam to pull 
that description in.  What a pain!  It would be nice if Opus-fam had a little 
mini screen-editor to let you see how a long file description will look to a 
caller in Opus when they list that file, and it would be nice if the 
mini-editor let you do a little full screen edit on the file description so 
you can line up sides of boxes or whatever if you want.  To see the complete 
description of a file with a long file description, you'd highlight the file 
and instead of hitting "E" to edit that description, you might hit something 
like F10 to see the full description as a caller in Opus would see it, and 
maybe F1 then to pull *that* into the little mini-editor.
3.  In Opus, after a caller has uploaded a file, have Opus do two things.
    a.  Look for a FILE_ID.DIZ file within the file just uploaded.
    b.  If found, ask the caller "Use internal file description text for
        BBS description?
    c.  If the caller answers "Y", Opus extracts the file_id.diz file       
description and installs into the Opusfam database as that file's       
description.  If the caller answers no, they are then free to add
        a freeform file description just like they do now.
4.  Along with the drop file options already on your list, allow Opus to be 
configured in opus.ctl to produce a drop file in the same format as either 
1.14 would have, or 1.03 would have.  I have some really cool games that 
originally came from The Softdisk BBS, from Daniel Tobias, who used to put 
out the diskette magazine "The Big Blue Disk".  These games are like a 
"secret word" game, a numbers game, "Planet of the Robots" - and a few 
others. They all produce "points" which are compatible with Daniel's master 
program called SCOREKPR.EXE which keeps track of all the points.  To play the 
games you need points, and as you win or lose in the games, this program 
keeps track of your point totals.  My users love these older games, that came 
from about 1988 or 89.  The problem is that they all require an Opus 1.03 
drop file.  So I now have to convert the 1.73a drop file to 1.14, then 
convert that to 1.03. Even though I copy the drop file to a ramdisk and 
convert, (part of my batch file controlling my Outside games section) it 
still takes like 10 seconds to do, and I am on a P75.  If Opus could 
automatically be told to produce a 1.03 drop file upon a caller going 
"Outside", that would be great!
Well, thanks for listening...
--- GoldED 2.50
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