alt.fan.eddings Daemons

I run a small collection of services relating to the alt.fan.eddings newsgroup. Collectively they are known as the AFE Daemons. Technically, for those who know Unix, they're really a motley bunch of cron jobs and filters, not daemons, because they don't run continuously, but the term has stuck and allows a better naming scheme.

When Itagne was running the Daemons, there were five of them:

• Mordja, the AFE Dispatch Daemon;
• Nahaz, the AFE Alias Registration Daemon;
• Horja, the AFE Birthdays Daemon;
• Agrinja, the AFE.creative Round Robin Daemon;
• Lamashtu, the AFE.creative News<->Mail Daemon.

Nahaz is no longer in use since Teut took over the administration of the Alias Scrolls from Aslade. The idea of Agrinja never really took off, and so I haven't bothered to reimplement it. Lamashtu should really be resurrected, but, for various reasons, I want to wait until the daemons are running on tolhoneth.org before I do that. This leaves Mordja and Horja.

Simplest first: Horja checks every day to see if it's the birthday of anyone on the Birthdays List, and if so posts a "Happy Birthday!" message to alt.fan.eddings. The Birthdays List is maintained by Aquarius (aquarius@kryogenix.org); mail him about additions, deletions, or modifications, or mail horja@tolhoneth.org if for some reason you need to contact both of us about Horja.

The Dispatch Daemon

Referring to Mordja as a single daemon is a hangover from the days when Itagne was running it. When I took over the daemons after Itagne lost any convenient way of running them, I rewrote them from scratch, and Mordja is now really several distinct pieces of software. It's divided into two logical halves: the first handles the various autopostings which you'll see on alt.fan.eddings and alt.fan.eddings.creative (the AFEC FAQ, the FAQ pointer, and the Silver Suggestions); the second, which I'll describe in more detail here, allows anyone to request that certain documents be sent to them by e-mail.

To use the mail facilities of the Dispatch Daemon, send a blank e-mail to mordja@tolhoneth.org, with the subject:

send <file>

where <file> is the name of the file as it appears in the catalogue below. If you want to receive the file in compressed form, then add -zip to the end of the subject line, for example:

send faq -zip

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