Scripts released!
More advanced and polished versions of the scripts described below
are now available in a generally-useful distribution called
pbemtools.
Riverworld PBEM Scripts
Most of the processing of player moves and GM Turns in the Riverworld
PBEM is automatically handled by a set of perl and shell scripts.
Since some folks have expressed interest in what's automated and
how's it done, here's the rundown.
What you're not seeing
Most of these scripts use a header file called
rw-lib.ph, which
contains all the character names and email addresses, and a function
which determines whether a given character should "hear" a given piece
of speech or whatever. Because these email addresses are private,
the file here is only a skeleton, not the real header. Sorry.
The basic layout
I keep my scripts and my turns in a directory out of my web tree,
while moves are kept in the web tree.
Moves
Players send their moves to the move address, which passes them
through the movefilter script.
This script makes a customized copy of the move for each player, based
on the languages they know, and mails them out. It mails an
omnilingual copy to the GM. It relies on players using the
format for moves, and putting their
character's name in []'s in the subject of the message.
When I receive the omnilingual move, I pipe it to the
movepipe script, which
calls rwhtml to convert the move to html
format and place it in directory for that turn's moves, and
insert-move, which adds a link to
the move to the master html file from which the home page is built.
The movefilter script adds a special mail header to the messages it
sends. I direct
procmail
(a excellent mail filtering
program) to run movepipe when I receive a properly formatted move.
Turns
The first step in writing Turns is collecting the player moves
into a single file, in order and sorted by player group. The
catmoves
script is responsible for this job.
I write my Turns using a similar format to those used for player
moves.
Tags control which players see which part of the Turn. Then I
run maketurn on my Turn sourcefile. I
actually run it twice: in test mode (-t or -d), it produces file
output, one for each player viewpoint; in standard mode (no switches),
it emails the Turns to the players.
I also run
distturn,
which updates the master.html file to include references to the
new turn, and calls updatebase (see below).
The turns you read on the web are actually generated on the fly
from the turn source files using the
spewturn CGI script.
I also use the rwnews script to
create a version formatted for Usenet (which I just post with inews.)
Producing the home page
The scripts above modify the master
html file, an exhaustive listing of all the files in the directory
tree. This used to be the home page, too, until one of the players
had the clever idea that the home page should function like an outline
which could be collapsed or expanded.
The result was expand.cgi, a
cgi script which produces (with no arguments) a completely collapsed
outline or (with 1 argument) an outline with one section expanded,
and returns it to the browser.
The updatebase script runs expand.cgi
with no arguments to produce a totally collapsed outline to use as the
home page itself.
If you select one of the "All Turns to Date" choices on the home page
(either for the story or the player views of the story), a concatenation
of all the available turns is produced by
allturns.cgi.
And that's how it's all done...so far.