NOTE: The program described in the following document is not guaranteed to do anything at all except consume approximately 80K of disk space. Use it at your own risk. No warranty, express or implied. This document assumes the following: You are running PCBoard 15.x or higher. You are carrying usenet newsgroups on your BBS. You know something about usenet newsgroups. You have the manual for PCBoard 15.x available. Purpose of Parsr 1.0: If you have any number of newsgroups on your BBS and you've been carrying usenet for any period of time, you probably have conferences configured that are no longer available. You also probably have conferences being provided to you by your usenet provider that you haven't configured on your BBS. You probably also have no good way to tell which is what, since you doubtless have better things to do with your time than going thru a few multi-thousand line reports. Parsr simplifies the solution. Basically, issue thie following command uuutil /export:groups then take the file GROUPS that was the result of the previous command and put it in the same directory as PARSR.EXE. Then copy the active.lst file (available from your usenet provider) to the same directory. If it's not named ACTIVE, rename it. Run PARSR.EXE. You'll find the following files in the directory after the program has finished: ACTIVE: Original input file ACTIVE.S ACTIVE file sorted alphabetically by group name. GROUPS: Original input file GROUPS.S GROUPS file sorted alphabetically by group name. AUC.LST List of groups available from your provider that are not configured in PCBoard. CUS.LST List of groups NOT available from your provider that ARE configured in PCBoard. Notes: You'll need a meg or so of available disk space when you run PARSR. You'll also need files=50 (or more) in your config.sys file. If PARSR crashes for some reason, you'll find a bunch of files named SWxxxxxx.xxx in the directory. Delete them and e-mail me the error code - I'll look into it. Mike.cocke@cencore.com History: 1.0 Released 1/6/97 1.1 Released 1/7/96 Why does it never fail that no matter how much I test it, when I finally release something, I need to update it the next day? Found a new and unusual way that the active list can be corrupted if it comes from an internet provider that runs a unix variant on the machine that is used to produce the active.lst file.