Read Me file for: Birthday.Scr ver 1.0 02/15/1992 by Big D Rubber City Atari BBS 300/1200/2400 216/376-0885 Thanks to: Outrider for his Audit script file, that gave me the idea for Birthday.Scr... Chuck Grimsby for his Todays program, that make a reason for Birthday.Scr BBS Express ST and all involved in making it what it is today.......... Why Birthday.Scr: I am sure most of us have run or atleast seen one of the Today programs. I have always liked them... But I have always wanted to have the users of my bbs birthdays show in a today program... That was always a lot of work because of 12 data files, divided up in to each month... Then Chuck Grimsby and his Todays.Prg ver 1.95 came to the rescue.. Besides having more options then the other today programs, it can also read from several differnt files sources, besides the regular monthly data files.... Soooooo I wrote Birthday.Scr to write to one of those files, all my users birthdays....... And that is the story of Birthday.Scr Now What Does this thing Do: When you run Birthday.Com, it will ask any user with a level of 1 or higher to enter there Birthday in MM/DD/YYYY format.. It will save that data to a file called Birthday.Dat.. Now if you have read the Doc file for Todays program,if not do so you, will know that on line 2 of the Todays.Inf file you can enter an Drive\Path\Alternate file name. Now if you make that file name Birthday.Dat guess what, when Todays program is run it will find any user of your BBS with a birthday on the current day and let the rest of your users know about it along with all the rest of the data you have for Todays program.... Settin Birthday.Scr up: 1- Edit the User-Definable Vars at the top of the script file.. 2- Compile the script file..................................... **** It must be COMPILED to work, if not it will screw the **** .Dat file.. DO NOT RUN TILL YOU COMPILE IT... ***** 3- Set up a directory to match what you specified as the path for your Data files in the script file........................... 4- Edit or create your own Birthday.Txt file.. Then copy it to your birthday directory...................................... 5- Set up one of your scripts early in the log on to call Birthday.Com ex: Welcome.Com................................ 6- Run Birthday.Com either though a normal log on or Exec from SysOp shell.. If it can find the Directory it will create the data file you specified in the script. You are ready to go.... Notes: Birthday.Com will egnore Guests. It will catch any user who has not been logged to the data file or any new user... All users with a level of 1 or higher will be checked to see if the current date is their birthday. If it is the Birthday.Txt file will be sent to them, as well as writting to your call log that it is their birthday...... Speaking of the call log. Birthday.Com will also write the birth date, their current age, and in parenthesis the age Express thinks they are to the current user on the log.. If you are running Audit.Com: 1- Copy your current BIRTHDAY.DAT and NAME.DAT files to an empty directory or blank disk.................................. 2- Copy the enclosed CONVERT.PRG to the same directory or disk.... 3- Now run the Convert program. It will rename your current .DAT files, then create a new BIRTHDAY.DAT file that BIRTHDAY.COM and TODAYS.PRG ver 1.95 can use................................. DO NOT TRY TO USE this new Birthday.Dat with Audit.Com.......... 4- Copy the new BIRTHDAY.DAT back to the directory where you orginally had it.. The BIRTHDAY.DAT and the BIRTHDAY.TXT are all you really need in the directory.. 5- If you like rename BIRTHDAY.COM to AUDIT.COM or what ever name you have been using and you are ready to go..................... Just about there: Now I hope you have read the doc file for Todays program.. If not do so now... Ok edit the Todays.Inf file so it will call your BIRTHDAY.DAT file as the Alternate file... Remember this can be the only file or you can also use the regular file in line one.. The choice is yours.............. Once you have all the files for Todays ver 1.95 ready all you have to do is set up you scripts to call Birthday.Com first then read the Text file create by the Todays program.... Example would be have your Welcome script call Birthday.Com... Then later have Logstat script show the Todays Txt file.... Remember you must run the Todays.Prg at the begining of each new day. You can do this from your logstat script based on Caller number 1 or from the endcall script checking the current date.... That should do it......................................................... I have enclosed some sample files for you to edit and use or just look them over to get some ideas on how to set up the whole thing.. Again the choice is yours. Welcome.Hlp >Runs Birthday.Com Logstat.Hlp >Do not run Todays.Prg from both EndCall.Hlp >Logstat and Encall choose one.. Todays.Inf >Sample shows VT52 and how to set >[I] option to show users....... If you are interested in formats: The format for BIRTHDAY.DAT for BIRTHDAY.COM is: *00000000 ------------------------------ * is the egnore symble for Todays program 00000000 is the place holder for the birth date - are the place holder for the users name. Once a user logs to this spot it will look like this: I 4041946 John H. Doe I will tell Todays program that this is a freinds birthday 4041946 Tells Todays program to show it on this date. John H. Doe is the users name, expanded to 30 character to keep the file in line. Thats all there is to it... If you need any help just call Rubber City Atari BBS 216/376-0885 24 hrs or Voice between 6pm-10pm EST 216/376-7618 ask for Don. As expected, I can not nor will not be liable for what ever happens if you run these files... You are on your own... All I can say is it works for me............