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The most important part of a conference is not the items, or responses, or messages - it is the participants of the conference. So it is only fair that Caucus understand participants, too! More precisely, Caucus understands the object PERSONS. You can LIST PERSONS, SHOW PERSONS, or even DELETE PERSONS.
The LIST command displays the full name(s) of a person or group of people, one name per line. LIST PERSONS is a good way to find out the full name of a person if you only know part of it. Each line displayed by LIST PERSONS contains:
An asterisk ( * ) if the person is a participant of the conference you are in
The full name of the person
The userid of the person (inside parentheses)
The hostname of the computer where the user enters the information
Remember that Caucus can find a person by a portion or abbreviation of their name. Specifically, Caucus does what is called an "initial substring match". This means that you can find anyone using the first few letters of any word in their full name.
As an example, the command LIST PERSON "RO" might display the names Ronald Reagan, Mr. Roberts and Charles Roth. It would not list Oliver Cromwell (contains RO but does not begin with it) nor Camber-Roth (Camber-Roth is one word)
In the general form of the command,
LIST PERSONS instance
the instance can be more than one word. In such cases, only the participants' names whose name parts match all of the words in the instance will be displayed. So the command LIST PERSON "M RO" displays only the one name Mr. Roberts, and none of the other names from the previous example.
SHOW PERSONS is similar to LIST PERSONS except it displays more information about each participant. SHOW PERSONS has a similar syntax:
SHOW PERSONS instance modifiers
For each person selected by the instance, Caucus displays that person's:
For example, the command SHOW PERSON "RON REA" might display:
Ronald Reagan (nsa001) 202-999-9999
40th President of the United States
Likes jelly beans (but not the Red ones!)
Last on Caucus: 19-APR-88 12:26 (now)
Last in demonstration: 18-APR-88 13:08
There are several special instances or keywords that may be used with LIST PERSON or SHOW PERSON, instead of a person's name. These keywords let you LIST or SHOW specific groups of people. The keywords are:
all (everyone in the conference)
organizer (only people with organizer powers)
include (regular users who are included in the conference)
readonly (people who only can read material in the conference)
exclude (former members specifically excluded)
For example, LIST PERSON INCLUDE lists all of the members of the conference who have been given full membership through the CUSTOMIZE USERLIST mechanism. SHOW PERSON READONLY would display those people who are only "readonly" members of the conference. LIST PERSON ORGANIZER lists those members who are listed as organizers in the userlist.
SHOW PERSONS ALL displays the full personal information about everyone in the current conference, sorted alphabetically by last name. This command can produce a long display if there are a lot of people in the conference. Remember that you can press <CANCEL> to interrupt Caucus and return to "AND NOW?".
The most unusual of these instances is EXCLUDE. The only people who would be listed with the LIST PERSON EXCLUDE command are those users who originally had access to the conference and joined the conference, but later were excluded in the userlist.
In many conferencing applications, it is useful to know how much of the conference a participant has seen. For example, suppose you are a teacher using a conference to post assignments and record class discussions. You may want to know if a student has seen a particular assignment. Caucus can give you this information in one of two methods: sorted for one person showing all items that person has seen, or sorted by a single item showing all people who have seen that item.
Caucus records this information for each person in a conference. You can see this information by using the ITEMS modifier on the SHOW PERSONS command. The general form is:
SHOW PERSONS instance ITEMS instance
where the first instance is a particular person or persons, and the second instance is an item or set of items. The set of items can be any of the instances shown in the table in Other Ways to SHOW ITEMS . For example, SHOW PERSON "I STU" ITEMS 1-4 might display:
Ima Student (csc123) 518-111-2222
Last on Caucus: 19-APR-89 13:21
Last in CSC-CLASS: 19-APR-89 11:18
Item Resp Seen
1 11 11 Introduction to CSC-CLASS conference
2 4 2 First class assignment
3 0 0 Second class assignment
which tells you that Ima Student is up to date on Item 1, has seen Item 2 and two of its four responses, and has not seen Item 3 at all.
Caucus also records this information for each item. You can find out who has seen a particular item with the following command:
SHOW instance PERSONS instance
Notice that the only difference between these two commands is the position of the ITEMS and PERSONS keywords and their instances.
For example, the command
SHOW ITEMS 1,2 PERSONS ALL
might display the following:
Item 1 (3) Welcome to Caucus!
Responses Name Userid
3 Mr. Caucus (caucus)
1 Ms. Ippi (ippi)
Item 2 (14) Second Item
Responses Name Userid
14 Mr. Caucus (caucus)
5 Mr. Thumb (thumb)
which tells you that Item 1 has three responses, Item 2 has fourteen responses and Mr. Caucus has seen all of the responses to both items. Ms. Ippi has seen one of the three responses in Item 1, and Mr. Thumb has seen five of the fourteen responses to Item 2.
All of the examples of commands in this chapter put quotation marks around persons' names. This is good practice, but not always necessary. Quotation marks are only required when something else follows the name or names on the command line.
For example, both LIST PERSON RO and LIST PERSON "RO" work. The command SHOW PERSON RO ITEMS ALL, however, looks for a person named RO ITEMS ALL. To work properly, the RO in the previous example must be within quotes to separate it from the modifier ITEMS ALL.
DELETE PERSONS may sound like a blood-thirsty command, but it is actually quite safe. Deleting a person means removing that person from the conference. A deleted person no longer appears in the list of conference participants, nor does Caucus keep track of what that person has seen in the conference. A deleted person's items and responses remain in the conference unless specifically deleted by the organizer.
To resign from a conference, you must delete yourself. (The organizer can delete any participant.) You need not fear deleting yourself accidentally because Caucus will prompt you for confirmation.
If you are not going to be participating in a conference in the future, deleting yourself (resigning) is the polite thing to do. It saves disk space on the host computer and makes it clear to the people in the conference that you are no longer an active participant.
A deleted person can rejoin the conference at a later date unless specifically prohibited by the organizer (see CUSTOMIZE USERS in chapter 12). If you rejoin a conference, it is as though you are joining for the first time. All of the items and responses will be new.