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Conferences

Conferences hold articles. They are represented in the protocol as a data type called Conference. Each conference has a creator, the person who created the conference, and a supervisor, a conference whose members can modify the conference. If the supervisor is a person, the members of that person's mailbox are supervisors, which in most cases is only that person. Persons are a special case: in addition to those who are supervisors for a certain person because of the supervisor field, the person is always a supervisor of himself. There is one exception to this special case: the person cannot use set-supervisor to change who is his supervisor.

We have also introduced a type called UConference (pronounced micro-conf-stat) which holds a subset of the information contained in the full Conference type. Use the UConference type whenever possible since it places a much smaller load on the LysKOM server.

Each conference has a type, which is essentially a collection of boolean flags. Currently the flags rd-prot, letterbox, secret, original, allow-anonymous and forbid-secret are defined.

rd-prot

The conference is protected from reading by non-members. Persons become members by having one of the existing members or supervisors add him or her to the conference. This restriction is enforced by the server.

original

Conferences of this type are intended for original articles only. Comments are to be redirected to the super-conf instead. This restriction is not enforced by the server; clients must implement this functionality. (See Recipients of comments, for a summary of how a client should select the recipients of a comment.)

letterbox

Conferences of this type are connected to persons. Letters to a person are sent to the mailbox and the name of the mailbox is synchronized with the person name. It is currently not possible to explicitly set or clear this flag on a conference.

secret

Conferences of this type are secret. The server will not divulge any information about the existence of the conference to persons who are not members or supervisors of the conference. If a mailbox is made secret, that person cannot log in using the person name, but must specify a person number instead.

allow-anonymous

Conferences of this type accept anonymous articles. Other conferences will reject anonymous articles.

forbid-secret

Conferences of this type do not allow secret members. If a conference is changed to this type, preexisting secret members remain secret.