Dom2 hosting help
 

I've written a Perl script which, when combined with the Postie 7.41 command-line eMailer, should make it easy for players to host multiple PBEM games simultaneously. The idea is to make it as simple as possible to email turns to all the players once the host has gone through the process of loading the game and generating the necessary turn files for the next turn.

It may not help all that much for single games (although I find it very helpful for the one game I'm hosting) but it should definitely make it much easier for players to host multiple PBEM games.

You need to download Postie (free) and a Perl distribution (also free). You'll also need to edit the script a bit for your particular game (instructions included on my page).

All the details (and download links for everything) are here:

http://www.maladjustite.com/dom2_hosting.html

DISCLAIMER : I am not a programmer - I basically taught myself enough Perl (in one afternoon/evening) to write this script. While installing Postie/Perl and running this script shouldn't hurt anything even if it doesn't work on your machine, it is definitely possible that you'll have to fiddle with the Postie commands to get it to work properly with your SMTP host. For example, if your server requires authentication via ESMTP, you'll have to include -user: and -pass: flags in the appropriate place on the Postie command line. The Postie documentation shows you how to do this, so check there. My ability to debug someone's script is next to zero. I did this mainly as a challenge to myself to see if I could figure out how to write a Perl script with basically no prior knowledge. It worked successfully on my machine with my particular mail server. If there are any programmers on this board, maybe they can suggest improvements or give hints.

Obviously, anyone is free to link to this as a Dom2 resource.

Re: Dom2 hosting help
 

Nicely done. Excellent for a first project. It looks like this could be called with a --postexec CMD where CMD is your script. After each scheduled hosting it would automatically mail out the trn files.

I take it this is meant as a Windows thing? It looks like it would work in Solaris and Linux but there are a hundred different ways to do that without downloading and installing anything new. I really thought there would be a way to just use Outlook with command line switches but apparently not (I looked, and Im pretty good at finding things on the net)

Again, excellent work. I wonder if someone can come up with something to process incoming emails to put attachments automatically into the game directory. I think some of the spam fighting softwares might have the ability to recognize subject lines and call an external program. Again I can think of many ways to do it in linux but I draw a blank in the windows environment.