Subj : Observations of the current ELIST.RPT To : August Abolins From : mark lewis Date : Sun Jan 09 2022 06:10 am On 2022 Jan 08 23:17:00, you wrote to me: ml>> ..i can think of several reasons to have an echotag listed ml>> in the echolist without it being distributed... if you ml>> can't think of any reasons, perhaps you need to review the ml>> last 30+ years of exactly why the echolist existed and ml>> what it was used for? AA> What precludes another listing with a matching echotag to be AA> listed? because there can be only one entry with the same echotag... AA> Basically, the ELIST can be used as a way to broadcast the AA> existence of local echos specific to one BBS? so, let's start at the beginning, ok? from fidonews319... Fidonews Page 13 12 May 1986 ================================================================= WANTED ================================================================= Thomas Kenny, 107/316 I'm very interested in ECHOMAIL networking. I know this is a can of worms, since some (many?) think ECHOMAIL may (will?) ruin FidoNet. Well I'm open minded and think it just might work out. Now to finally get to the point. I've been on a few different FIDOs across the country and have discovered that the use of ECHOMAIL is much more widespread then I originally thought! I've seen several interesting topics being networked, but would have never known about them. Since there is nobody (as far as I know) acting as an ECHOMAIL coordinator I'd like to volunteer. I'd like to do two things. 1 Find out which Sysops are running ECHOMAIL and for what topic. 2 Create a wishlist registry. This way if a Sysop wants to network an ECHOMAIL topic or generate interest in a new ECHOMAIL topic there will be a clearing house for such an activity! I ask everybody that is reading this to please send me FidoNet mail if you: 1 Are a sysop running ECHOMAIL (what topic & routing), 2 know of a system running ECHOMAIL (what net/node & topic), 3 wish there was somebody else that shared a common interest (what topic). Thank you very much, Thomas Kenny, Metatek FIDO, 107/316. ----------------------------------------------------------------- and this article by mike fuchs from fidonews533... FidoNews 5-33 Page 7 15 Aug 1988 Mike Fuchs 1:1/201 EchoList - The EchoMail Conference List (It's bAAAAaaaack...) Ever wonder what all those EchoMail conferences are about? Ever wonder if there was already a conference on some specific topic? Well that's why the EchoList was originally created. And that's why I've resurrected it. For those of you who might not be familiar with it, a little history... The EchoList is an informal listing of EchoMail conferences, as described by each conference's moderator. It is now a monthly publication which attempts to document certain interesting information about EchoMail Conferences; "interesting" to people who would like to participate, interesting to EchoMail Coordinators and those who route the conference traffic, and potentially interesting to the Conference Moderator. The base product of the EchoList database is the detailed Conference listing. But, as needs are identified which can be satisfied with the available information, additional reports and analyses can be developed. The EchoList was originated by Thomas Kenny, who maintained it as a text file completely manually. It was a time consuming effort, and was updated on a very sporadic and infrequent basis. The last edition published this way was December 1987. Several people (myself included) were working with Thomas on developing ways to automate the maintenance, and provide a structured database that could be used for things other than a simple conference listing. As a result, he assembled a specification for submitting messages that would be used for updating the list. Unfortunately, Thomas decided to drop out of FidoNet before any of the code was completed. He continues to have my gratitude for all he put in to getting the EchoList as far as he did. Since I was interested (for purely personal desire) in having an EchoList, I picked-up that last 1987 EchoList, built an R:base database and application, and keyed the whole thing in. The result is a semi-automated update application, and some nice report generation facilities. There's a lot more to be done. It's still a VERY labor- intensive task. But, I'm happy to say I've been able to publish all updates received for the last 3 months on-time. Now, I'm going to try and ruin that by inviting more updates... HISTORY LESSON OVER... That's why I wrote this article. It has been pointed out to FidoNews 5-33 Page 8 15 Aug 1988 me that there are a lot of people who don't realize the EchoList is available. Most importantly, there are a lot of Conference Moderators who don't know, and as a result their conferences aren't in, or will soon be dropped from, that list. You see, one of things that seems to be widely agreed upon is that, in order to be really useful, an EchoList needs some control criteria. Hating bureaucracy as I do, I've only implemented two (at this point). First, in order to be listed, a conference must have a responsible party to whom questions can be directed; that person is the Moderator. Second, since reference information is only valuable if it's up-to-date, an EchoList conference entry must be updated via message to me on a regular basis. So there's the reason for the article. A number of conferences have already been dropped because they had no moderator identified. (How anybody's supposed to join a conference when there's no one identified to contact, I'll never know, but so be it.) The other thing is that most of the entries' last-update dates are VERY old. Starting with this next EchoList, I will start enforcing a purge criteria. An awful lot of conferences will be dropped as a result. Many are dead wood anyway. But there are many such conferences I know are alive and well, and I hope this article gets the message to those moderators. If you frequent a conference important to you, how about letting the moderator know about the EchoList? Oh yeah, I lied. There is one more control, but it is for the Moderators themselves. A Moderator can submit an entry that becomes password protected. From then-on, the moderator has some feeling of control over the information listed in the EchoList for their conference. [...] i'll stop there for now as these two articles provide the basics and they are also easily found so one can read them for themselves... how did i find these articles? i used grep and searched my fidonews archives for "echolist" and then for "thomas kenny" to find the original article(s) and motivations... here is a list of all fidonews editions up to Vol 9 Num 52 that contain the above mentioned search terms... grep -EiH -e "(thomas kenny|echolist)" fido???.nws | cut -d":" -f1 | sort -u fido319.nws fido339.nws fido407.nws fido410.nws fido422.nws fido423.nws fido425.nws fido426.nws fido429.nws fido432.nws fido433.nws fido439.nws fido446.nws fido447.nws fido507.nws fido508.nws fido514.nws fido533.nws fido534.nws fido541.nws fido626.nws fido739.nws fido741.nws fido817.nws fido823.nws fido826.nws fido829.nws fido837.nws fido903.nws fido904.nws fido911.nws fido912.nws fido930.nws fido931.nws fido942.nws fido950.nws fido952.nws i stopped there for a couple of reasons... one was just because... another was at some point, every issue contains "echolist" in it... these above are the most important, though, when it comes to the history of the echolist... there are a few more, as well, but these are the best place to start... fido410 speaks of the format of the echolist... it even mentions one reason why a non-distributed echotag may be listed... somewhere around here i have other documents that speak of maintaining echolist entries of echotags for the purposes of showing ownership and maintaining that ownership... i'm just the messenger so please don't anyone start on me about that... it is what it is... the support areas for WORDSTAR, WORDPERFECT, NOVELL, and others come to mind... in any case, there's a bit of reading on the origins and use(s) of the echolist for everyone to enjoy for a little bit... )\/(ark "The soul of a small kitten in the body of a mighty dragon. Look on my majesty, ye mighty, and despair! Or bring me catnip. Your choice. Oooh, a shiny thing!" .... Five word horror story: Three Billion Devices Run Java --- * Origin: (1:3634/12.73) .