[Asterisk-Users] Re: delaying "answer" for a number of ringsor an amount of time

[Wilson Pickett]

> Right.  My original question was about making Asterisk wait a number or
> rings (or amount of time) before picking up a Zap line.  If the
> rings/time were not reached while the line is still ringing, do nothing.

As someone must have already said, it's not a good idea to share lines
with asterisk. This said, when we first began to use asterisk, I
needed a way to have it NOT pickup when we temporarily had phones in
parellel on the same 2 lines. When a line was flagged in the database
as "/pickup1=0" the dialpan did a goto(do-nothing,s,1)

[do-nothing]
exten => s,1,AbsoluteTimeout(0)
exten => s,2,NoOp("doing nothing: call came if with flag set to noanswer")
exten => s,3,Wait(70)
exten => t,1,Hangup

The above code made asterisk *never* pickup, so it must be possible,
though not  good practice, to do what you want, unless things have
changed in more recent versions.