THE YEAR 2000 PROBLEM

The purpose of this page is to brief you on status of our products, ALLFIX and WebUtil, concerning the year 2000 problem. We have summarized the results in the table below, further down this page you will find more detailed information about this products:

ALLFIX

ALLFIX itself uses four digit years in all of its date calculation routines. As you know, ALLFIX interfaces with a large variety of BBS programs, Fidonet mailers, and Email clients. Not all of these programs use 4 digit dates. When ALLFIX encounters a two digit year, it will use a technique called "windowing" to determine the proper year. This method works as follows:

Situation 1:

If the year <= 80 then we add 2000 to the date. For example, 00 would be converted to 2000 and 01 would be converted to 2001.

Situation 2:

If the year > 80, then we add 1900 to the date. For example, 99 would be converted to 1999.

As you can see, this system provides a "window" in which the dates are correctly converted, namely from 1981 to 2080. Any dates outside of this range will not be converted correctly. The bottom line is, therefore, that ALLFIX is millenium proof up until the year 2080.

However, it goes without saying that if your BBS, Fidonet mailer, and/or Email client is not millenium proof, that you may experience problems with the integration between those products and ALLFIX. To help you evaluate your situation, we will add a list of programs to this page, that we know of use 4 digit dates.

WebUtil

The current version of WebUtil only performs date comparison in the HTTP portion. The comparison is done to determine if a file has been modified since the last time it was downloaded. The dates reported by an HTTP server always contain four digit years. Therefore, WebUtil should not encounter any problems. The FTP portion does not perform any date calculation or manipulation. The IF_MOD feature uses the file size to determine if the files have modified, and not the file date. The reason for this is that determining the date of a file using the output from the FTP servers is very unreliable since many servers report the date in a different format.