RS> Since BBSes that support QWK packet technology must
Must?
RS> already have a globally unique ID (the so-called BBS-ID or "Board ID"
What happens if a BBS lacks such ID?
RS> from which their QWK packet files are named),
What if BBS doesn't use QWK?
RS> it made logical sense to reuse this same ID as the method of RS> correlating any message received via FidoNet with the avatar data RS> stored
Where?
RS> for the message author.
Author or BBS?
RS> BBSID: <bbs-id> RS> Where <bbs-id> is a string of between 2 and 8 monocased ASCII RS> characters, begining with an alphabetic character (betweeen 'A' and RS> 'Z' inclusive).
The word "monocased" reduces the characters to letters.
RS> Only MS-DOS compatible filename characters may be included in a RS> BBS-ID.
DOSes are dead for over 20 years. What is the reason for such limitation?
Filenames MAY (as in FTA-1006) contain any characters (bytes) except 0x2F ('/') and 0x00 (NUL). Software MUST be able to process these names correctly, but MAY use limited character subset when creating files.
RS> Although a BBS sysop would best serve their users by having a globally RS> unique BBS-ID, there's no existing known method to insure that is the RS> case. So some creativity and research on the part of the sysop is RS> recommended when determining what their BBS-ID should be and it should RS> not be changed once the system usership has been established.
If you want to introduce the globally unique user ID, you should look at some hash functions, especially ones designed for cryptography. Or simply use GPG public key fingerprints for this purpose.
-- Alexey V. Vissarionov aka Gremlin from Kremlin gremlin.ru!gremlin; +vii-cmiii-ccxxix-lxxix-xlii
