JDS Plugins are plug-ins for Excalibur BBS. Excalibur BBS is no more supported or upgraded, and so are JDS Plugins since 1999. However, from time to time, there will be requests for information about Excalibur BBS and JDS Plugins. Chris of Burma Cave and Dave of Teccmecca do a very good job of providing such information. There is a usenet newsgroup called alt.bbs.excalibur for discussion of Excalibur BBS and there is also a newsgroup called alt.bbs.jds for discussion of JDS Plug-Ins. Both these newsgroups have been practically dead since 1999 except for some occasional post querying about Excalibur BBS or JDS Plugins. Again, Chris and Dave do monitor these newsgroups and provide information. There are not too many Excalibur BBSes around now, but at one time there were more than 1500 BBSes hosting Excalibur BBSes.

JDS have released more than 50 plugins for Excalibur BBS, many of them as freeware and others as shareware software. These plugins included Online games, System Administration utilities, and Internet Access utilities. In 1999, it was decided to make all the JDS Plugins freeware and support for them from JDS stopped at the end of 1999. However, all the JDS Plugins required registrations and the registrations were freely available from certain BBSes and web sites. Unfortunately, all those BBSes and web sites have too vanished as with most Excalibur BBSes.

JDS have been asked many times to make available the registration routines for the plugins. Due to time constraints, this had not been possible till now. JDS have recreated the registration routines as ASP code and placed it here for anyone with the Grail license number to obtain the Codenumbers and Regnumbers for all the JDS Plugins. JDS Plugins require a initialization file named jds.ini in the %windowsdirectory%. The jds.ini file will have various sections like [JDSIE], [JDSIM], [JDSNEWS] for respective plugins JDS Internet Everywhere!, JDS Internet Mail and JDS News. Each section in the jds.ini will have its initialization settings for the corresponding plugin, and in addition the "CodeNumbers=************" and "RegNumbers=************". Without the Codenumbers and Regnumbers, the plugins remain unregistered and functional only for Userid 0 (Sys Admin). The Codenumbers and Regnumbers are dependant on the unique Grail number of the BBS, actually the first 11 digits of the Grail number. Initially, the Grail numbers were 11 digits long before the internet connectivity was introduced. Then, the Grail numbers were made to be 15 digits long. Never the less, the new 15 digit long Grail numbers still contain unique first 11 digits number. In otherwords, no two Grail numbers have the same first 11 digits. Thus, the Codenumbers and Regnumbers for any JDS Plugin is unique to a given BBS.

JDS will provide the Codenumbers and Regnumbers for all JDS Plugins free to any Sys Admin on the condition that they be not sold or bundled with any software. Also, the Sys Admin must provide his/her full name, nickname, BBS name, BBS internet address, and a valid email contact address in addition to first 11 digits of the Grail number. These information will remain confidential except perhaps your BBS name and BBS internet address.

Click here to obtain your registration numbers for all the JDS Plugins.

Have a nice day!

JDS

March 4, 2006