About Mercury

Mercury is a set of scripts that scan the comment board of the User Friendly Comic Strip. Its main purpose is to notify users via email if a new comment is posted in a specified location.

The name Mercury is derived from the roman messenger-god, and is also a reference to a similar (but different) tool, mARS created by IByte.

This is implemented as a set of Perl-scripts for filtering and processing, together with a PHP frontend. The Perl-Scripts are designed to be flexible and could be of use for others writing similar tools, or, in some cases, even for completely different things. You can download the source below.

Mercury, the UF Board Watcher, and all its parts.
Created by Daniel Kinzler, 2004. All Rights Reserved.

You may use, copy, modify and distribute this program freely, provided the
following conditions are met:

1) No money is charged for and no profit is gained by the use and/or
distribution of this program or any derived work.

2) This license remains intact and is supplied with and applied to
all copies of the program or any derived work.

3) Credit to the original author of the program is given in all places
where it appears in the original work.

4) This program is only used with the consent of the website it accesses.
Specifically, since this tool is designed to process the contents of the
userfriendly.org webpage, it may only be used with the consent of the
executives of User Friendly Media Inc., specifically J.D. Frazer.

5) be nice!

that's it.

This is the Mercury change log. Because i'm lazy, and like coding much
better than documenting, not all changes are documented here. But i'll try
to better myself... so here goes (newest first):

2006/06/15:
- added nice level configuration (sweep process priority)
- added ability to work with cron (status file interpretation)

2004/06/28:
- "Who's on" page now also shows post count.
- Integrated Full-Text search into backend.
- RSS now has a Full-Text mode.

2004/06/27:
- "Who's on" page shows who posted most recently.

2004/06/26:
- RSS Feeds of the current board and arbitrary filters.

2004/06/25:
- Removed account-info from subscription file. mercury_sweep now uses
accounts directly.
- Added "Site Lock" feature.
- HTML-Mail now operative.

2004/06/21:
- Added code suggested by Korazail for indication the TLP in Mails.
- Added "Mail Format" and "Mail Noise Level" options to user Accounts.

2004/06/20:
- Fixed file-locking bug to avoid loosing the subscribtion file
due to concurrent write. That actually happened :(

2004/06/19:
- Human-Readable verbalisation of threads (name instead of id): crufty.
- Reworked keyword snytax.
- Created a Help-Page.

2004/06/18:
- Established this change log
- JavaScript cludge to force default-button in the query form.
- More usability stuff.

2004/06/17:
- Reworked extractor part of the backend: split into parser and filter.
- Chache and re-use parsed version, instead of re-parsing every time.
- Subscribers are no longer notified of posts they wrote themselfs.
- Scan frequency for diaries (6 hours) decoupeled from the board (30 minutes).

2004/06/15:
- Presented to the Ufies. Many useful comments.
- Fixed some spelling issues and minor bugs.
- Some usebility improvements.

-- EOF --

* better handling of thread-names (crufty).
=> better verbal cache, use stored verbals in mails

* Send welcome-mail to new users. include:
- server-url
- current account-settings
- current subscriptions (warn about none)
=> repeat every month or so??

* Delete Account (+admin)

* Forgotten Password (+admin)

* Make login case-insensitive !!

* Check diary / thread before subscribing.

* handle old boards like diaries (bigger threashold)

* Clock-Skew is fatal...

WBN: contact from config

WBN: Diags: dump effective config

WBN: Daily digest

WBN: optionally scan message bodies for keywords. SLOW!

CHECK: Frontend + mercury_start: dirs / files from .ini

CHECK: perl unicode

CHECK: fancy chars in keywords