Tech Background


ACME News is composed of:

The scripts are all written in Bourne shell - no Perl allowed! The four C programs are:

extract
A clone of Bryan Higgins's extract program. This formats topics and responses for output, and also does searching.
post
A clone of Pete Hanson's post program. This adds new topics and responses to the database, and also handles hiding and scribbling.
context
A new program to keep track of a user's current location and advance to the next new responses.
parti
A new program to manage a user's current parti files - they keep track of what the user has seen in each conference.

The topic database is completely compatible with picospan and yapp. Topic files can be moved from a picospan or yapp system to an ACME News system without needing any sort of conversion.

Authentication is currently done through the web server's standard "Basic Authentication" mechanism. We may switch to cookie-based authentication at some point. There's also an extra layer of nonce-based authentication on forms, to prevent spoofing.


ACME News help page, welcome page, login page.
ACME News Admin <news-admin@mail.acme.com>