Looking for old BBS archives/message areas
reddit / bbs

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[deleted] · 2014-01-25 07:01

I'm looking to recreate some archives of old message bases, either on
my BBS or on the web.

[Kirkman14 posted recently](http://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/1u6vv
6/archives_of_old_fidonet_messages/) about old Fidonet messages, so
along these lines, I'd like to as if anybody who used to run a dial-up
board has a backup anywhere they can restore.

I'm particularly interested in echo nets, but will take anything.

My focus is on message areas, but if you have complete archives/system
backups that you can't be bothered digging through, then I'll take
whatever's on offer.

If you'd prefer to send me a hard drive or disks, that's good too. I
should be able to easily get into any HD that's not MFM or RLL.

I have some Amiga, Atari 8-bit, and C-64 hardware here, so disks of
those machines should be doable too.

I won't make any private messages public, and I won't release any
copies of software or regkeys. I'm basically just interested in the
public/echo message areas.

I've got a Facebook group of BBSers from my city, and some of them are
looking for backups. But being in New Zealand, our BBSs were quite
small scale compared to the US, and not many of my friends were hooked
up to Fidonet.

Thanks for anything you can provide.

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temotodochi · 2014-01-26 00:03

[Metropoli](http://files.mpoli.fi/) still has the old archive up. It's
mainly pcboard stuff, some demoscene productions (demos, intros, MOD
music etc), some old drivers, OS/2 stuff and different programs. I
still get my hackers view hex editor from there.

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[deleted] · 2014-01-26 00:50

Thanks for the link.

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Kirkman14 · 2014-01-29 23:08

Great project.

ExecPC (telnet://bbs.execpc.com) has a cache of Fidonet messages ca.
1998-99. Definitely worth grabbing those and archiving.

Starfleet HQ (telnet://bbs.sfhqbbs.org) is an Atari ST BBS which has a
bunch of networked subs with old messages.

Not sure if there's a good way to extract these via telnet, but sure
would be awesome to have them saved somewhere else in case the boards
ever go down.

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[deleted] · 2014-01-30 01:59

Awesome, thanks a lot.

I think the easiest way would be to do like in the old days, turn on
logging, and go thru all the messages on-screen. The other way would
be to ask the sysops for copies of the files in JAM/SQUISH format. :)

I've already thought about writing up a script to process and import
into my BBS. My software (Mystic) has an importing feature that
imports one file as a message, but you have to populate an ini file
with the to/from/subject/filename/etc.

So I thought I might script that depending on the original source
file.

So far, I haven't heard back from any of my local friends, and the
only stuff I've found has been really infantile stuff from
textfiles.com. Mind you, they have a lot of BBS ads archived, so that
might be something else I do, is make one sub for vintage BBS ads. :)

Thanks for those pointers, I'll go check them out.

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the-crotch · 2014-02-19 05:01

FidoNet HolySmoke Archive

Approximately 350,000 messages from the FidoNet HolySmoke religious
debate echo, spanning 1993 to 2004, indexed, threaded, and searchable.

http://www.tdavis.org/holysmoke/