V. News and threaded news Directories

I. Standard news directory

This is directory (news) contains site news. In this directory, you can have one file named news and 0-9999 files named rand.????.

The news file contains … site news :-) This file can contain both mac style (end with ‚\r‘) and unix style (end with ‚\n‘) line. DoZ and windoZ style line (end with ‚\r\n‘) is not allowed. This file is sorted from oldest news to newest one.

You can also have some rand.???? files. Each time someone requests news, HSX randomly choose one of this rand files and prepend (add before) it to news content. Rand filename ends with 4 digits. The value starts at 0000 and can reach 9999. Hole in the number sequence is not allowed (if you have 0012 for instance, you must also have 0000,0001,0002,…,0011). Any change of number of files or file contents is dynamically taken into account without restarting HSX.

Example:in your news directory, you have these files:

  • news
  • rand.0000
  • rand.0001
  • rand.0002

The first user reading news will receive rand.0001 (for instance) and news, the next, rand.0000 and news, and so on.

II. Threaded news directory

This is directory (tnews) contains site threaded news. Threaded news appears in Hotline server V1.5. Threaded news looks like usenet news tree. You can have 3 basic objects, the bundle, the thread and the article. HSX supports all of them.

  • Bundle consists in a set of bundles and threads. You can have as many bundles or threads as you want.
  • Thread can only contain articles and are not limited in number.
  • Articles contain messages. Maximum message size under HL server is 64KB. With HSX, this
    limit is higher (near 1.5MB), thus you can embed HTML news with pictures (like GHX can do).

HSX stores bundle and thread as directory. Article is stored as file.

The tnews directory is in fact the root bundle for client, the bundle with no name. If it exists, the threaded news are available else, they are disabled.