[F] ------------------------------------------------------------
[A] BottleChat - an anonymous Gophernicus Gopher Chat forum
[Q] ------------------------------------------------------------
(Q) What is the BottleChat forum ?
(A) A semi-anonymous Gopher-based bulletin (chat) board.
(Q) How is it semi-anonymous ?
(A) Other than host IP traffic logs posts are identified only by
an ever-changing 8 character alpha-numeric session ID tag.
(Q) How can I prevent my IP address from being logged ?
(A) The torsocks package, available for most platforms, can be used
with many Gopher clients. Using a VPN is another option.
(Q) How persistent are these posts ?
(A) Posts are culled automatically to a set amount (42).
(Q) Is there a length limit on posts ?
(A) Probably but it varies between platforms and clients. Keeping
posts under 256 characters is a good rule of thumb.
(Q) I selected 'reload' but am not seeing new posts ?
(A) Client refreshing varies; most support Ctrl+R though some like
the Gopherus client use F5. If all else fails check the docs.
(Q) Which Gopher clients don't work ?
(A) UMN Gopher can post but not scroll; work-around is to use 'S' to
save menu to local file for viewing (background client first).
(Q) What about using nc(1) / netcat(1) ?
(A) Both work fine as simple clients; some examples:
$ echo '/users/bottles/' |netcat sdf.org 70 |less # reading:
$ echo '/users/bottles?my post' |nc -N sdf.org 70 # posting:
Readability is improved by filtering output through AWK:
$ <nc/netcat output> |awk -F'\t' '{print substr($1,2)}' |less
(Q) Anything else ?
(A) Staring at screens all day is bad for you! Make time to engage
the living world while you're still a part of it.
:: internals ::
(Q) How was this implemented ?
(A) Entirely in AWK, specifically NetBSD AWK, a nawk variant with
some extensions imported from gawk. For all the details see
http://man.netbsd.org/awk.1
(Q) Does it only work with NetBSD AWK ?
(A) No, the code has been extended so as to accomodate pretty much
any modern AWK variant, including those lacking time functions.
(Q) Is this forum Gophernicus specific ?
(A) Yes, unfortunately all Gopher servers implement CGI scripting
their own way if they support CGI at all, which many don't.
(Q) Where can I get the code ?
(A) Coming soon! Documentation and explanatory comments are being
added so as to make it fairly easy to implement and customize.
