Tech Background
ACME News is composed of:
- around 50 small CGI scripts
- around 75 tiny helper scripts
- four medium-sized C programs
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>