Reading the news on BBSes
reddit / bbs

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lurkastan · 2013-09-28 00:39

Back in the day, I always wished I could do things like read the news
or check sports scores on the BBSes I called.  At best, you might find
the news being discussed in the forums, but that's not quite the same
thing.  I think the Compuserve, Prodigy, etc users had it better back
then.  No matter -- in 2013, it looks like my wish is finally coming
true!  I can now read the news on two of the BBSes I call, thanks to
the magic of RSS.  Cyberia (telnet://cyberia.darktech.org) has CNN and
Sky News feeds available for reading.  I really like Cyberia's
implementation; you can easily browse the news stories by headline,
reading only the ones you're interested in.  It feels very natural!
Black Ice (telnet://blackice.bbsindex.com) has a wider variety of
feeds available, including ESPN and TechCrunch in addition to more
traditional news sources, as well as a bunch of German language feeds
(it's been a long time since I studied any German so I've been afraid
to dig too deep into these just yet...).  Some of the feeds aren't
complete, but even the incomplete ones offer a useful way to view the
headlines at a glance.

If anyone knows of other BBSes doing interesting things with feeds or
adding features that should've been available back in the day but
weren't, feel free to mention them here.  I'm still waiting for a BBS
I can check stock quotes on...

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[deleted] · 2013-09-29 05:50

That's cool that other people are doing that. It's never been hard and
echomail to usenet gating has been done for a while.

I just started to research doing my own RSS feed gateway for my BBS
last week, thinking I'd add a few things like RPG and gaming related
feeds.