YAPP-3.0 FEATURES
- Customizable:
- A system administrator can tailor (via the WWW) the overall look
and feel of Yapp's web pages to fit their web site.
- Each conference can optionally be tailored by the host(s) of the
conference.
- In (Unix) text-mode, each user can customize the formats of
various tables as well. This should be true in the near future
for the WWW as well.
- Expandable:
- Because of the scripting-language capability of Yapp, anyone with
Unix access can expand WWW functionality by writing scripts to
access Yapp information.
- Also, Yapp is able to interact with other Unix utilities,
pipe output through filters, etc.
- Hierarchical administrative model:
- Yapp allows each conference to be directed by a different set of
hosts, each with administrative power over that particular
conference. The hosts are overseen by one or more conference
administrators, who have control over conference creation/deletion
etc. This allows administrators to delegate authority over
specific conferences to others, instead of having to oversee
everything.
- Conferences linked to mailing lists:
- Yapp allows each conference to be optionally linked to an email
list. Thus, all messages sent to the list will appear as Yapp
responses, organized into topics by subject.
- When a mailing list consists of several Yapp systems, this allows
a conference to be shared between any number of remote sites.
- Another important use is to allow users to keep up on a Yapp
conference without logging in by joining a mailing list. (This
feature has been requested by numerous users in the past.)
- Text-based mode:
- For systems which allow access via Unix logins, being able to
access the full functionality of Yapp from any type of terminal
can be very important.
- Compatibility with PicoSpan means that users already familiar
with PicoSpan from the WELL, etc. don't have to re-learn anything.
Also, all data files are compatible, so that Yapp and PicoSpan can
even co-exist on the same system using the same files.
- Rich feature set:
- Yapp contains many features which have proved very useful for
large conferencing systems over many years of experience. These
include, but are not limited to, searching for text either in
topic subjects or in the text of topics, linking topics to multiple
conferences, freezing topics so they don't allow responses, censoring
responses, letting users "forget" topics they aren't interested in,
and listing the participants of a conference.
- Public read-only conferences:
- Yapp optionally allows special "public" conferences which can
be accessed in a read-only fashion via the WWW without
authenticating. This is useful when you want to "advertise"
information from Yapp and provide links to the information from
outside pages. This way, users are not bothered with having to
go through the new user or login procedures in order to access
those pages.
- Simple, secure URLs:
- Since no user state is encoded in the URLs, any Yapp URL can be
referenced anytime, anywhere, by anyone. Thus, no "half-hour
security holes" exist as might exist with advertising your URLs
into other Web BBS systems.
- Also, Yapp does not impose any "idle time" limit when reading
conferences.
- HTML sanity-checking:
- Yapp allows HTML in responses, and can detect invalid HTML, allowing
the user to correct mistakes before the final submission.
Back to Yapp page
Last modified: December 14, 1995
By Dave Thaler <thaler@armidalesoftware.com>