SnevlCID Package Discussions

[Pete]

Steve,

You have made my day!

This is great news.

Thank-you.

[stevea]

Steve,

Is there a way to do a whole phone exchange block with your application?

Say like blocking any numbers like 555-123-1***, or 555-12x-**** or 555-***-****

Pete,

Yes. In the Phonebook, create a new entry, mark it blocked, and put in the partial phone number with "%" as the multi-character wildcard, or "_" as single character. For your examples, you would put in

5551231%
55512%
555%

However, you could also use
555_234567

to block 5551234567, 5552234567, 5553234567, etc.

Steve

[Pete]

Steve,

Is there a way to do a whole phone exchange block with your application?

Say like blocking any numbers like 555-123-1***, or 555-12x-**** or 555-***-****

[Pete]

What has changed here locally is that I now pay extra fees / taxes on my VOIP lines.

With that occuring my VOIP lines ends up in some database anyways.

Geez what is wrong with this "picture"?

Consumers (users of telco anything) having to pay "extra" now; and the telemarketing industry functioning (willy nilly like) with a total disregard of do not call org lists, using whatever numbers they want and CID lately with absolutely no compliance to anybody but themselves.

[stevea]

Curious how long do you personally think that having a VOIP number will dissuade telemarketeers (even unlisted) from calling?

I guess I don't know. There must be some over-arching registry of numbers that have been assigned, to make sure numbers don't get double subscribed. However, I would not think the VOIP providers publish their numbers, or at least I hope they don't.

Steve

[Pete]

Interesting you mention Doctors and Dentists offices.

One example that I saw which would cause issues was a patient (she was maybe some 70 or so years old) falling off an examining chair.

The office manager did call 911 concerned about the womens head injury.

Would they have remembered to remove the "private call" CID stuff if it was enabled? Probably not in that case.

I also utilize voip here.

Curious how long do you personally think that having a VOIP number will dissuade telemarketeers (even unlisted) from calling?

[stevea]

Pete,

I've noticed that Doctors and Dentists that want to call us for follow-up stuff almost always have Private numbers too, so I've had the same problem as well. I try to get them to call our cells, but several times we've not managed to get their calls.

When we switched to VOIP I made the decision to not move over our old land-line number. It was right during the 2012 election, and we had been getting 6-10 robo-calls per day. By moving to a new number (and leaving it unlisted, which is the default with VOIP), I've managed to almost eliminate any unwanted calls. So I may go ahead and remove the "PRIVATE" block at some point.

Steve

[Pete]

Just a comment here relating to CID in general...

Here I have now been just blocking any CIDs which utilize "private" or that are out of state or 800 numbers or this and that....

Yesterday during a "test" disaster recovery thing for a non mentioned bank and a phone call to my home showed a generic non descript CID coming in and of course it was blocked and dropped.

Thing is and it probably wouldn't matter anyways; but in the event that there was a disaster and someone had called 911 from the DR site; there would have been no geographically methods to pin point the call; therefore the on site DR folks would have a really big issue trying to get help should that have occurred.

[Pete]

Steve,

Its working OK right now with the two HS boxes and one W2C on each of the boxes.

I may have tried the serial version of the W2C box around HS Version 1.7 or so.

It did do all of the telco stuff then except for the TTS stuff.

[stevea]

Thanks Steve. I can download it.

I am currently now using your application on two HS boxes.

Wondering though if your application would talk to the old serial w2c box and the usb box at the same time?

Pete,

Unfortunately, Rich et al went only far enough to support the USB version, and although HSPro is supposed to support two of those, I haven't ever heard of anyone successfully doing it. All the Snevl CID interaction with the W2C is through Homeseer, so if they don't support it I guess I don't either. Sorry.

Steve

[Pete]

The older serial W2C box would work except for the TTS stuff.

That said lately thinking of just dropping the call instead of even answering it as soon as HS sees that its a non wanted call.

Thinking too it would be great to record the garbage call and set a call back with a redial to same telemarketer of say 60 minutes with their own message and CID (with an added piece of text) each time or autoforward the coming call to a disconnected phone line.

Found a bunch of sites relating to telemarketing stuff:

http://www.scn.org/~bk269/telemarketing.html

Found the original recordings made by Pat Fleet regarding wrong number etc. here:

http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/portic...uncements.html

I converted the mentioned above wave files and uploaded here:

https://db.tt/iTeHjXDn

I also copied them to my homeseer directory.

[Gogs]

Steve,

Is there a way to make your HS2 script/plugin just do a "real" fast busy signal from the way2call box instead of the combo TTS / wav file?

I am thinking with so many telemarketing calls it might be faster now just to do the fast busy signal then hang up on the call.

Now Pete you have given me an idea as I also get too many marketing calls.

I think I'll did out my old way2call box and see if I can get it working again with HS and SnevlCID.

[Pete]

Thanks Steve. I can download it.

I am currently now using your application on two HS boxes.

Wondering though if your application would talk to the old serial w2c box and the usb box at the same time?

[stevea]

Steve,

Is there a way to make your HS2 script/plugin just do a "real" fast busy signal from the way2call box instead of the combo TTS / wav file?

I am thinking with so many telemarketing calls it might be faster now just to do the fast busy signal then hang up on the call.

Pete,

I'm pretty sure the only thing that we can do through the W2C is TTS or a WAV file. So the "real" fast busy can't be done.

The fast busy signal (SIT - Special Information Tone) is available in a pretty small WAV file on the Internet, I think. I have a copy on my server at home, but we are currently on a road trip so I can't access it.

Steve

[Pete]

Steve,

Is there a way to make your HS2 script/plugin just do a "real" fast busy signal from the way2call box instead of the combo TTS / wav file?

I am thinking with so many telemarketing calls it might be faster now just to do the fast busy signal then hang up on the call.