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Bulletin Files

This page is for the BBS operator (the sysop). Players do not need to read it. For the rest of setting the game up, see Door Setup.

The game writes its scoreboard, its news and its rankings out as files, so your BBS can show them on its bulletin menu and your website can carry them as pages. Each one is a screen the game shows a caller, drawn to a file instead of a terminal, so what a reader sees is what a player sees.

Turning them on

Set BulletinDir in bbs.cfg to a directory:

BulletinDir   /home/bbs/xtrn/imb/bull

The game writes the files there whenever it runs its daily or planetary step. Leave the setting blank and none are written.

A path with no drive letter and no leading slash is read as being inside the data directory, the same as the packet directories.

What gets written

There are twelve bulletins. Every board writes these three:

Bulletin Shows
scores The scoreboard
tdynews Today's planet news
yesnews Yesterday's planet news

A board in a league writes nine more. These belong to the league, so a board playing alone has nothing to put in them and writes none of them:

Bulletin Shows
world Every battle and WMD strike fought anywhere in the league
bbsscore Top planets by score
bbsworth Top planets by net worth
bbsland Top planets by land
bbswland Top planets by net worth per region
plyscore Top players by score
plyworth Top players by net worth
plyland Top players by land
plywland Top players by net worth per region

bbswland and plywland rank by net worth per region, not by land. The name does not give that away, so it is worth saying once.

Each bulletin becomes four files, two for your BBS and two for your website:

scores.ans   scores.txt   scores.html   scores.inc.html

So a league board writes 48 of them, and a board playing alone writes 12. The three files you can edit, further down, are yours and are not counted here.

For your BBS menu

Each bulletin is written twice: .ans with colour and .txt without. Point a bulletin menu entry at whichever your callers can read.

Both are CP437, the character set BBS software and ANSI art programs expect, so the rules and blocks come out as single characters. You can open a .ans in PabloDraw or Moebius and it will look right.

For your website

Each bulletin is written as two HTML files as well, because boards do two different things with a scoreboard:

  • scores.html — the whole page, to link to
  • scores.inc.html — the block on its own, to drop into a page you already build

You get both, so you do not have to choose.

The three files you own

The first run that finds them missing writes three more:

  • header.html — everything above the bulletin, including the whole <head>
  • footer.html — everything below it
  • bulletin.css — the stylesheet

The game never writes over these three again, so your edits survive every later run. Delete one and the next run puts a fresh copy back, which is how you start over.

Your nav, your back-link and any meta tags go in the header and footer. Nothing about them is fixed: the game only fills in six words, and the rest of the markup is yours.

Word Filled in with
{{title}} The name of the bulletin, "Scoreboard" or "Top Planets by Land"
{{bbs}} What your board is called — BBSName in bbs.cfg, else BoardID
{{boardurl}} Your board's own website — BoardURL in bbs.cfg
{{pageurl}} The address of this page — BulletinURL plus the file name
{{date}} The game day the bulletin was written for
{{game}} The name of the game

Delete a word and it simply does not appear.

The three bbs.cfg lines they read are covered in the settings below.

Meta tags

Add them to header.html. The words above work inside a tag, so a page can carry its own title, address and date:

<link rel="canonical" href="{{pageurl}}">
<meta name="description" content="{{title}} on {{bbs}}, a {{game}} planet.">
<meta property="og:title" content="{{title}}">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="{{bbs}}">
<meta property="og:url" content="{{pageurl}}">
<meta property="og:updated_time" content="{{date}}">

A tag whose word comes out blank is taken out of the page rather than left empty. So you can add all of these now and fill in BulletinURL later; until you do, those pages simply carry no address. A link is handled the same way but keeps its text, so your board's name reads as plain text when BoardURL is not set, instead of linking back to the page being read.

Colours and the stylesheet

The colours arrive as class names, <span class="ansi-fg-14"> and <span class="ansi-bg-4">, numbered 0 to 15. A stylesheet can repaint a class; it could not repaint a colour written into the tag.

bulletin.css is a starting point rather than a requirement. The only thing naming it is a <link> in the default header, so pointing that at your own sheet is a one-line edit and the game's copy then goes unused.

The pages it draws are black to the edges and set in one monospace face, so the bulletin sits on the same ground it was drawn for.

The game's own name, at the top of every bulletin, links to the game's website. It carries no underline and keeps whatever colour the screen drew it in; a highlight bar marks it and brightens when you point at it, the way a DOS menu marks the line under the cursor.

If you write your own sheet, note that the dark half of the sixteen colours is too dim to read as body text on black. The game's own screens keep every figure and heading on a bright colour or white and use the dark ones for parentheses and banner dashes, so this is a limit of the palette rather than of any one page. bulletin.css lifts the dark colours for a reader whose system asks for more contrast.

The bbs.cfg lines

Four settings in bbs.cfg belong to the bulletins. All four are optional except BulletinDir, without which nothing is written at all.

BulletinDir   bull
BBSName       The Dog House BBS
BoardURL      https://doghouse.example/
BulletinURL   https://doghouse.example/bulletins/
  • BulletinDir — where the files are written.
  • BBSName — what your board is called on the web pages. Write it however you want it read. It is separate from BoardID because BoardID has to match the league roster character for character, and a name written for a reader should not be pinned to that. Left blank, the pages use BoardID.
  • BoardURL — your board's own website. The header links your board's name back to it.
  • BulletinURL — the address the bulletin directory is served from. The game knows where it writes the files and nothing about how your web server reaches them, so this is the one thing it cannot work out for itself. It is what makes {{pageurl}} work.

See Your board's own settings for the rest of the file.