
                  French Mod Division - Behind The Scene     
                 An Inside Look at the French Mod Division   
                          by Spotnick (1@20397)              
               

Introduction


  Due to the fact that english is my second language, you may have a hard
time reading this, even if my english skills are improving with the years.
This article is a small text about the French Mod Division, how it started
and who is behind it.


The Pre-French Mod Division Period


  Really, it started back in 1990 when I opened my 1st BBS called The Fortress
of Shadow, switching from QBBS to WWIV (after 1 month only) with the influence
of a friend in school who was running WWIV on the school system. Back then I
didn't know what was a BBS.

  One of the users that applied on my system, was Dark Shadow. I met him at
a GT later where we end up at Mike's drinking beer, beginning a long
friendship. Dark Shadow is, for the record, the 1st person to open a WWIV
bulletin board in the 514 area, which is now one of the 3 largest areas of
WWIV systems; back then it was v4.05 or something. His system has been closed
for a while and asked me to beta test his system by calling and testing it.
For 1990, his system was incredible at 1st sight, it was using conferences and
was multi-node! These features ended up in v4.23, but Dark Shadow was always
the first one to do anything, but unfortunatly, never released any of these
modifications.

  Through the years, we helped each other, I was the mind behind some
modifications and he was the programmer, and we started to work together.
Most modifications were solo projects to impress each other, but my own
modifications back then were very simple and I never released a "real"
one. In 1991, many modifications on my system were by Dark Shadow, I was
learning C by having tips from him and started doing mods by taking a bit
of his style. Truthfully, he's always said to me "Read the book" to learn by
myself, yet always helped me. In the beginning of 1992 or end of 1991, I was
running my bulletin board on a version I called WWIV-LSD which was a look-alike
version of the LSD Software, which was pretty popular around here even if it was
nothing compared of what I can do today. I released my "real" 3 first
modifications back then.

  LSD01.MOD: Network Origin at bottom of post (like the LSD BBS)
  LSD02.MOD: LSD-type 2 way chat.
  LSD03.MOD: The orginal emergency chat password modification.

  No big deal here, but the #3 is the 1st ever release "Emergency Chat
Password" modification for WWIV, there are so many out now that I can't
even count them. The #1 was original, it's more a FIDO type tag line that
anything else. #2 isn't really that great when I think about it compared to
my current two way chat.

   I also consulted a user on my system who was a C expert, because
nobody was able to fix the TIMEMOD.DOC done by Bilbo Baggins, and that was
the release of the Time Window modifications, which is, not updated yet, and
probably I would do better today if I started this kind of modification.
I've always planned to implant a time window (or reservation) for specific users
on a certain time, a certain day, and then got deleted, but I never started
the project, maybe in the future.

   By that time, Dark Shadow was doing modifications for my system and his
own also, but wasn't releasing many modifications. If you go in some mod
collections for v4.11 and v4.12, you should find some by Dark Shadow.
Many modifications done today were already done by him back then, but he
wasn't releasing them and keeping all of them for himself only.

   I had to close my system in 1992 for 1 year and a half, but back on
July 28th 1993, I reopened on a version done off-line with WWIV v4.22 and
I started what I did earlier, "cloning" the best of many softwares and bring
them into WWIV. My system was kind of a clone of ViSiON-X at the beginning,
and due to time, is getting more and more personnal. If I weren't running
WWIV, I'd be running ViSiON-X since I like that software a lot.. But one of
my hobby was modifying WWIV, so I wasn't able to quit WWIV, that's why I added
the most possible, to make my WWIV version look like ViSiON-X.
I released my 1st mod in June 1993, it was SPOT001.MOD which is a mix
of rumours & random titles which is still installed on my system, but of course,
modified and enhanced. It took me until August, after I opened my system, to
release the SPOT002.MOD, a good series which ended up to SPOT025.MOD.

   Until the release of WWIV v4.23, I did SPOT001 to SPOT011.MOD. If you look
closely at SPOT010.MOD, you will find the ancestor of the now famous ALTW-02.MOD
(The VGA WFC Status Screen), which wasn't really a hit when it was released.

   With the release of WWIV v4.23, my system, now Alternative Worlds, became
an Official WWIV Support Board and Beta Site since I am the official french
translator of WWIV, so that gave me 2 months running WWIV v4.23 before
everyone, a real advantage because in 2 months I did a lot of work and
release many modifications just before WWIV v4.23 was released, I even
released the 1st v4.23 modification, SPOT012.MOD, a small top 5 upload/download
which wasn't a big deal..

   The release of v4.23 was a big chance for many people to become better known
in the WWIV business, because many modifications of pre-4.23 weren't working on
this enhanced version of WWIV. By request, I did the 1st BBSlist modification
(SPOT013.MOD), which is, of course, ViSiON-X BBS List system. The next mod was
probably another good one, SPOT014.MOD, which ends with the D release. The only,
modifications that allows the extended description to be shown in the new
tagging system. I stopped to upgrade this modification when I logged on The
Funny Farm to upload a new software by Dark Shadow (WWIVESE2.ZIP) and saw
ListPlus on-line! It was a shock, I downloaded it right away and installed it on
my system.

   Meanwhile, Dark Shadow was creating the current ESM competition, WWIVese
which is, according to me, a very good utility. It took almost 7 months to
create and finish it. WWIVese is an external string editor, was shareware
at the beginning, and finally ended up to be cardware.

   The release of SPOT015.MOD didn't make any noise, but to my big surprise,
its little brother is in the edition of June of WWIVnews as the "Mod of the
Month", you will probably read about it later..

   Then, the story really begins. I decided to rework SPOT010.MOD for v4.23
and since then, I learned how to change the text mode to VGA mod, so I
did in 2 hours an update and released SPOT016.MOD... Due to the fact that
this was the 1st ever release WFC Modification for WWIV v4.23, many people
installed it. I updated it many times, until the "C" revision, the "D"
revision is actually the 1st mod ever released by Dark Shadow and myself
together.

   The second one is basically all done by Dark Shadow, I modified it to
look to like ViSiON-X, SPOT017.MOD, the only, up to date, one-liner
modification that allowed to keep a limited amount of lines only. This mod
still has some multi-instance problems, but is working great on single
node system.

   With the release of SPOT016.MOD, many new visiting sysops called my system
and asked me to release some more modifications, that's why SPOT018.MOD was
released.. it enhances the last caller list , but I think there is still a
bug in the release version.

   Suddenly, Filo posted a text file about a mod contest with a prize.. with
a call, I convinced Dark Shadow to release a Super-Mod for this contest, which
ended up to be DS007.MOD, a very powerful modification. Dark Shadow also
released a "memo" modification and a graphical Zlog which were also good
modifications, but not multi-instance aware.

   From 18 to 25, the modifications are "normal", many other pieces of
ViSiON-X, when finally, it began...


French Mod Division - The Beginning


   Due to the success of SPOT016D.MOD which was the 1st team project, we
decided to join together as a "group" instead of writing both names. The main
idea was to not include our names to keep our identity kind of secret, but
that part was a bit forgotten after that. I would lie if I said that we hadn't
stolen that idea from Asylum.  Well, maybe, but the name wasn't easy to find.
The "Division" was the 1st term to be found, due to a long story of a band name,
and the "French" was an idea found while watching stuff on my billboard of a
french group called "French Bastards". After that and trying to mix many terms,
we finally ended up with French Mod Division which seemed like a cool name. Even
if this is a group name, French Mod Division will probably stay a duet between
Dark Shadow and I.

   On the day we decided to claim our modifications to be from the group and
not from a single person, we released ALTW-01.MOD which was a request I had
done to Dark Shadow a long time ago. The WFC modification was planned to be
released as #2, but before it came out, we released a few others. #2 is a
total success! Still almost bug free, this is our major modification up to
date. ALTW-07 is also a big piece of work, a must for every WWIV SysOp.

   Up to date of this text file, many of our mods as a single person have
been redone as a group mod, because it was the main idea of it. We have
released 25 modifications, not all that has to be mentioned yet, but still,
quality modifications. We don't plan to release in a next future "easy"
modifications because it's time to evolve a little from the level we are up to.

   In this mind, WWIVsys was created. Taking from all our experience, we
decided to continue a project that has been running for a while, but we never
tought of it seriously. WWIVsys will be on its release the "major" utility for
WWIV SysOps, and it is our first real try on the shareware market. Hoping that
it will work great, we have been working many hours on the project. With a
great group of Beta Testers, we have tried our best to make the program the
easiest possible to learn and the more "user-friendly" possible. This software
is considered by us as a normal evolution and the ultimate-software to ease
the SysOp job and make it more enjoyable. If this is a success, probably other
quality software will follow, but still, this software will be the ultimate
SysOp tool.




