Managing your BBS

Accessing the Online Management

Identify your aGNeS url, for example: http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/bar/agnes?FooAgnes+FooAgnesHTML . Several items can be identified in this url:

• www.foo.com is the server which contains your articles, if your forum is remotely hosted at Vestris Inc., Switzerland, then it is agnes.vestris.com

• cgi-bin is the CGI directory in which aGNeS is located

• agnes is the name of the executable (binary) and can sometimes be renamed to agnes.cgi or forum.cgi

• bar is the directory, section or partition on which your forum is located, and is often seen when forums are hosted in large numbers, such as at Vestris Inc., Switzerland

• FooAgnes is the data alias, which identifies your articles

• FooAgnesHTML is the template alias, which identifies the template page to render

To access your management section, replace all the arguments after the ? by manage , for example http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/bar/agnes?manage .

For example, the http://agnes.vestris.com/db-cgi/intensive/agnes?StiAgnes+StiAgnesHTML forum's management section is accessible at http://agnes.vestris.com/db-cgi/intensive/agnes?manage

aGNeS Administration

The aGNeS administration section (?manage+admin) lets you select your board's alias, enter the appropriate password and change values that are proper to your bbs.

If you have forgotten your password, an option to email the password to the board's administrator will show up. If somebody else's email address is listed, then you have not selected the right bbs. If your email address has changed, you will have to email the administrator. He can then change the password for your bbs.

The administrative section allows you to:

• update the templates cache : for more information about the cache, please refer to the section called Templates Cache

• delete your aGNeS BBS : this will permanently delete your board and cannot be reversed; if you are not using a BBS any more, please use this link

• modify administrator password : change the password for your board

• change the administrative name/e-mail : change your personal information

• modify the url of the template pages : change the location of your template pages; if you need to change the extensions of the file names, please create a new bbs

• enable/disable user access mode : modify the private/public bbs features

In addition, it provides links to

• delete articles and archives , please refer to the section called Deleting Articles and Archives for more information

• archive articles , please refer to the section called Creating Archives for more information

• merge/rename archives , please refer to the section called Merging and Renaming Archives for more information

• edit/moderate articles , please refer to the section called Editing and Moderating Articles for more information

Group Administration

The group administration section (?manage+general) is the first-time installation section. For more details, please refer to the section called First-time Configuration in Chapter 2 .

List All Equivalence Structures

The list all equivalence structures (?manage+list) command shows all the alias definitions derived from existing boards, which include the locations of the data on the server and the locations of the remote template pages.

aGNeS maintains aliases in the equiv/equiv.struct files, types aliases in equiv/admin.struct files and defines passwords in equiv/admin.struct files. This architecture is a legacy process from the older versions of the BBS, but allows a very powerful syntax for alias definitions, which was handy in the times, when the boards were created manually.

List All Obvious Associations

The list all obvious associates (?manage+obvious) command shows all existing boards, including the number of articles posted and the last date of an article, not including archives.

Because the aGNeS core allowed to create more than just bullentin boards, this command has such a strange name. The same equiv files were able to share configurations for guestbooks, simple forums and links launchers.