What is possible with today's technology that wasn't possible in the 90s reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DavidJohnYVR · 2017-07-08 12:34 I been thinking a lot about BBSes and ways to modernize them and I appreciate a lot of what has been done recently with python mods and such. For example coming across apps that let you tweet to twitter and seeing new games being developed has been inspiring it got me wondering about modern day potentials and limitations of what can be created. In the past, due to the nature and limitations ansis and such could only be displayed so fast but with today's technology it makes me wonder how much further it can be pushed, do you think it's possible for games like a fighting game like streetfighter or an ansi platform er like supermario could be produced for a bbs? Or dose the nature of displaying ansis and bbs software limit what is capable. A lot of what is out there is free ware but I been thinking about making an actual product and business out of a game for bbses, in hopes to generate new interest in bbses but I am new to coding and have been wondering if it's possible for a bbs to have in bbs credit card purchases. Anyone want to share their thoughts on my questions? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kirkman14 · 2017-07-08 13:42 If you stick with ANSI as your character set/encoding, then the main difference now is bandwidth. You can send a lot more characters more quickly. But other constraints remain: most terminals default to 80x23, though some will support up to 132x60. That's extremely low "resolution" for graphical games, but they are possible. I don't know if you saw my reply to your games post, but I have some examples there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kirkman14 · 2017-07-08 13:45 Other thoughts: Shooter Jennings has integrated bitcoin into his BBS, i believe. But I would really caution you against trying to build a business on BBSing. It was a niche hobby back in the day and it's way more so today. Whatever you do, do it for fun and for yourself. You are unlikely to make money or gain notoriety. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lubujackson · 2017-07-08 15:31 The most obvious thing is concurrency. You can have near infinite people on at once and aren't limited to number of phone lines. Second is distance. BBSes were mostly regional by area code because of phone company costs. You could argue this was a feature, though, because it helped breed local communities and lead to real life meetups and stuff. They were also uniquely run by individuals. You can't make a modern version of BBSes without considering this. They were more of an ecosystem of individuals (more like MySpace or Tumblr) than a single big website (Facebook). You would go check your messages and activity on each one separately and each one would have a slightly different focus. Honestly, if I was to try to rebuild BBSes I would look at teens as your users. I would definitely make it as a phone app. Maybe something where you can only connect to someone's phone BBS if you are in their contacts or they give you access. But I do think it is possible to make something like this - teens want to communicate with groups and express themselves and there aren't a lot of modern ways for that (mostly they just use Snapchat now). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cloverskull · 2017-07-08 17:20 Today's BBS technology relies (typically) on unencrypted telnet. Previously analog dial-up phone lines obscured BBS traffic. Now that's gone. However, I'd like to think we are crafty enough to come up with a new iteration of telnet which does include some form of encryption. SSH (in my opinion) is not the right answer - too many other things rely on SSH, and it doesn't feel right to take it over. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kevinlamonte · 2017-07-08 18:50 Encrypted telnet exists in the forms of Kerberos and TLS integration, but that is way too much work for a distributed network run by a herd of cats like BBSes. SSH would be OK to me, just stick it on a different port. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- L1th0 · 2017-07-09 00:44 BBS's have come a long way. For instance, ecweb4 is mobile device enabled, you can telnet to the BBS using htmlterm on your mobile device. Also, ecweb4 has threaded messaging which is a big plus. Synchronet, I believe, is working on up and down voting posts. You can import RSS feeds to your BBS on the telnet side or the html side. Lastly, VADV BBS also has VAPHP which can support web templates on the web side and you can import RSS feeds as well. It would be nice if you could use door.sys in networked flash, java, or html5 games. So, BBS's are being modernized, it's just there's only a handful of programmers working on it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NuSkooler · 2017-07-10 04:00 What's wrong with SSH? It's secure, well known and supported, and works well. ENiGMA½, x84, and I imagine a few others support SSH BTW. Secure WebSocket (wss://, which is WebSockets over TLS) is also supported for a number of boards -- generally via fTelnet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kevinlamonte · 2017-07-10 13:40 > Or dose the nature of displaying ansis and bbs software limit what is capable. Today's tech permits full UTF-8 streams + mouse support, so one can now create full keyboard+mouse text user interfaces that run cleanly against xterm, terminal.app, and putty over telnet or ssh. If you add sixel and RGB color support you can even do images right in xterm: one could create a full RIPscript-like environment. This is far beyond what basic ANSI.SYS could pull off, especially with the relative dearth of terminals that do 8-bit codepages like CP437. I am more interested in other pieces of the BBS era like qwk mail and Fidonet-style store-and-forward networks. We got used to the idea of the difference between "online" (basic data transfer) and "offline" (qwk mail, prepping uploads, sifting through downloads) and I would like to see a return of "offline mode", where one can do a lot of the hard work of communicating in private without a bunch of smartphone apps and JS-heavy frameworks spying on you along the way. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cloverskull · 2017-07-10 14:59 Unless you rewrite an ssh daemon specifically for the bbs you end up giving out your bbs user password, and then you have to disable things like scp. It just feels like a vulnerability waiting to be exploited. In my ideal scenario, telnet would connect and attempt to encrypt traffic, falling back to unencrypted if the client were unable to go secure. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NuSkooler · 2017-07-11 19:28 You're going to have to "specifically" create any new protocol for a BBS. Falling back to encrypted is a terribly huge security hole BTW. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=don%27t+roll+your+own+crypto ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ellisgl · 2017-07-16 05:46 Would be neat to X,Y,Z,Kermit over SSH. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- istarian · 2017-08-16 02:26 Security hole how? Unless the user is provided real shell access the security risk to the system is minimal. It's the user's security that's compromised, no? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NuSkooler · 2017-08-16 04:32 Uh yeah, it's a security issue for the user. That's the point. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- istarian · 2017-08-16 04:40 Why not use SSL/TLS? I mean making the user run something like [stunnel](https://www.stunnel.org/index.html) could be a a pain and you still need the server component, but there's no shell access then right? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- istarian · 2017-08-16 17:40 You could also use some form of public/private key crypto, no? Presumably the server would publish it's public key (either at connect or via other means) and then you would send it your public key encrypted with it's public key so that you are transmitting an encrypted form of your key so the server can send you stuff that only you should be able to read. Presumably the above exchange would happen as part of the login process and any time you want to change the password/key. Whether it was used for anything else could be configurable. Using asymmetric encryption in the above manner would surely add a layer of security for at least the login step. I'm not quite sure how you'd implement the client server ends though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nyquilxx · 2017-10-27 20:40 How about the mosh protocol ? i recently just heard about it ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DavidJohnYVR · 2017-10-27 20:51 tell me more!