Subj : Top-5 User Bulletin Generator
To   : All
From : Codefenix
Date : Fri Jan 14 2022 05:10 pm

As seen in the Facebook group this week, this is a javascript I came up with which parses Synchronet's log files and generates a MSG bulletin of the top 5 users in different categories (top five callers, top five posters, top five message readers, top five uploaders/downloaders, etc.). 

https://github.com/CraigEMP/topfives.js

You can call it on the command line or as a timed event, specifiy "month" or "year" bulletins, and display the output to your users during login.

By default it outputs an animated bulletin containing AT codes to control the cursor movements and delays, but it can optionally write to a "simple" bulletin instead.

It works by doing a wildcard search of all the *.log files for the specified month/year in the /data/logs directory, keeps a tally of the stats within each. It ignores MS*.log files in an attempt to speed up the search, but as Rob/digital man pointed out, there are other log types which also should be skipped (FS*.log and http*.log), so I'll make an edit to the script very soon to ignore these as well. (thanks dm!)

I got the for it idea from seeing various top 5 and top 10 lists on other boards. I used to see them all the time on WWIV boards back in my hometown during the 90s, and they're fairly common today on a lot of Mystic boards. There are a few tools already available that generate similar lists for Synchronet (syncdoor, syncstat, and top10usr to name a few), but frankly the output from those is fairly lackluster in my opinion, so I decided to try my hand at making my own.

I hope people find it useful.

---
 þ Synchronet þ -=[ conchaos.synchro.net | ConstructiveChaos BBS ]=-

.