Conscience of BBSing or Why are we reimplementing BBSs badly reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2020-01-29 16:19 I often remark that people love reimplementing BBSs badly, and a fraction of the functionality. Of course it's not an entirely fair comparison because of the scope, different UI/nature of the web, audience size, and speed of communication to name a few issues. It's important to note that your average decent BBS had most if not all of the following: \* Files - Often meticulously organized, with sometimes user voting or strict moderation. Unlike a lot of file sharing today, most boards also had things that would extract descriptions from archives or otherwise let you write them manually, along with providing other file metadata. \* User Management/Registration - Complete with idiot filters for the more underground boards (apps, voting on users, new user passwords) \* Mail - Even later, various versions of distributed mail including early email access for many people as well as things like FIDOnet \* Instant Messaging/Chat - There were entire huge multi-node boards entirely devoted to this, and even a single node board at least had sysop chat usually \* Games - Door games, mail/message games, offline sync'd games \* Timelines/Walls - Lots of plug-ins for this type stuff to leave short messages, shouts, etc. \* Time Management - Not necessarily a good thing, but on some boards you could bank time. Moreover, the fact there was time involved with your login on some boards created a sense of purpose and urgency. \* Keyboard Shortcuts - Godsend compared to your average web app, but also a drawback for some. \* Customizable UI - Most boards at least let you change menus, if not install plug-ins and other add-ons \* Distributed Content - Various boards would call each other or a sync service or otherwise download sync files to sync data such as games, not just mail. \* Groups/Subcultures \* No Frills - Despite being over modems primarily and thus slow, BBSs were pretty fast. In fact, I still feel like I got to more relevant information faster. It's not just a keyboard and mouse thing, it's about flow and the fact that the goal of the BBS was to deliver you some content quickly and efficiently. Navigation in web pages just sucks sometimes in so many ways - multi-page ads, long click funnels, huge percentages of random things I don't need on the screen like sidebars, etc. The #1 thing about BBSs is at least for the better, BBSs, they tended to be more restrictive and served as great content filters. If you were an idiot, you simply could not join or got banned. There was a sense of excitement to get on a new BBS and see what it had, and with many, a status attached, especially in various undergrounds. There were always troublemakers, but they were limited and it was part of the fun usually to fight and have factions. The small scale really made you feel like you knew everyone, even on large BBSs with tons of users. Sometimes this also meant that we all met up in real life and that changed how you interacted with people. It also sometimes deflated your view of certain people. Source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12784760](https://news.y combinator.com/item?id=12784760) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2020-01-29 16:20 Found this while surfing around and felt it was a good thread to share. I make no clams as the author and would encourage everyone to give a up vote to [optionalparens](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=optionalparens) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- arcadeshopper · 2020-01-29 18:08 Interesting, of course my BBS been up all these years and has all those things and it seems like nobody's interested in any of them except for specific games or activities online mostly specific games that you can only get on worldgroup or major BBS edit- typo ---------------------------------------------------------------------- orion3311 · 2020-01-29 18:41 Interesting topic, as I recently dialed into a bbs (via phone) that I felt like “wait, this is it??”. I think for the files area to be interesting it has to have stuff worth perusing. If you’re a generic bbs it may be tough to find stuff to put in there, OR relabel the areas as vintage stuff if you’re putting up an actual shareware cd for example. Keep in mind people who never used a bbs wouldn’t even think to look for files, its just not how its done today. The games are probably the biggest draw, and Id focus on this area moreso than others, but setting up door games requires some dos skills that most of us forgot, so it make take some effort to get them working again. The bottom line though is that these are purely for fun at this point, so just like back then some will be better than others. Without the limitations of long distance calling you can connect to any bbs, so just find a few you like and stick with em. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2020-01-29 19:00 Personally the big draw is the networks, fsx, zeronet, agora, and fidonet are all areas I pull from plus been looking into setting up a usenet and uucp bridge. Sure that's not what the new kids on the block is going to be looking at but that's fine with me. There's a lot of retro /vintage guys on these networks and some of them use to hang out in the same circles as I did in the day. So instead of hearing all the "ok boomer" arguments and be flooded by memes and lack of utter conversations. This Gen-X would rather hang out with the boomers on BBS. Now the doors thing I get completely too; since I use to write scripts to support both apps that used cgi, posix, and door.sys standards back in the early '00s its a skill I still remember if only as a faded memory. Though I do love mystic's menu system. It works great with ncurses apps and I've even gotten it to work with docker (e.g. docker run --rm -ti ...). Been really fun using it to work as a menu system to launch up dosbox, simh, cu, nethack, and even open sessions to classic machines I have laying around let alone a whole host of cli tools that linux has. I think the only real way that one could think of a bbs these days in the same way is as a sort of peer-to-peer social sharing. Albeit not in the same capacity as it was in the day nor could it. Facebook has the lion's share and everything else does one thing well. For bbs's that's retro computing, store and forward networks, ansi art, and door games. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2020-01-29 19:08 yeah I know what you mean; everyone keeps asking for doors and games but non login for them. I think it's part of that exclusivity and killer app culture that every site faces these days. think of it this way; one can download a copy of 'x' on just about anything these days or run an emulator. But not anyone can just download a copy of L.O.R.D. or full featured door games and run that in an emulator. The moment that happens no one would bother outside of say for maybe access fidonet and zero/argora net. And that would be an even more skewed nitch users. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- G_Porgie · 2020-01-29 20:58 What made BBS's great back in the day was, unfortunately, a product of the limitations of the technology that we used back in the day. It is those same limitations that led to the very swift end of the BBS era when the internet became consumerized. I do look back fondly on those days, and I occasionally log into a board now and then (even going so far as to engage in good ol' echomail discussions, still using SLMR on my 486). Among these limitations: 1. For most of its "hayday" (which I'd say was between the mid-80's and early-to-mid-90's), most BBS users were running between 1200 and 2400bps modems. Most also had terminal screens that were either 40 or 80 columns wide, with 25 or 50 rows of text. Some supported colour, many didn't. 2. Most BBS's had one line with a local phone number, though larger ones (many requiring membership fees) had multiple local numbers or even the odd 800- number. 3. "Network Mail", or "Echomail", or other multi-BBS concepts all used a store-and-forward process that required messages to hop along routes between BBS's, and could only do so while the nodes along the route weren't busy with BBS callers or maintenance. There was no always-on network to utilize for these. 4. The same applied to "Filebones" and "Inter-BBS Games". This got so long, I have to break it up into a couple of posts. 1/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- G_Porgie · 2020-01-29 20:59 Almost everything we fondly recall about the BBS world back then were really products of these limitations. There were a lot of things we wished we could do back then, that we can (and do) do now using internet technologies, but we don't think of them the same way, because they are no longer implemented as the kind of quaint, localized thing we remember back in those days. Here are some examples from your own post: >Files - Often meticulously organized, with sometimes user voting or strict moderation. The vast majority of files being shared on BBS's were Shareware and demos (with some warez here and there). BBS file areas were a great way to disseminate shareware and demos because, especially with FTN Filebones spreading files along FidoNet, publishers could get their programs in the hands of users who otherwise had to look for them at the local computer store. Of course, the reason for "voting" and "strict moderation" was because of all the chaff that came with the wheat of the day. First, many good "file" boards had download limits in place that would incentivize users to upload files. That was how those boards kept their libraries fresh with new files. Unfortunately, that also led to a lot of users uploading warez, pron, viruses, duplicates, and other useless crap that had to be sorted-through before it could go back up for download. A lot of evolution happened since those days. Tucows and CNet and other sites became the new "one-stop-shop" for shareware. Then the internet got faster and bigger, and larger software publishers moved to hosting their software on their own sites (removing game demos and productivity apps and other useful app from the equation). And now we have "Stores" that really do the vetting and publishing of software from large and small publishers alike and even deal with the exchange of money for buying software. Of course, we also now have the ability to purchase, rent, stream, and/or download music, movies, and other content that we couldn't even dream of getting from a BBS (a single HD movie is about 2/3s the size of Rusty and Edie's entire file area of the day) >User Management/Registration - Complete with idiot filters for the more underground boards (apps, voting on users, new user passwords) Some people fondly remember the "L33T" boards from back in the day. I'm not one of them. At least in my area, L33T boards were almost always either dedicated to warez, porn, or both. Door games and message areas completely sucked on those boards, and the sysops were usually 13-year-old edgelords. No thank you. >Mail - Even later, various versions of distributed mail including early email access for many people as well as things like FIDOnet I miss echomail more than anything else about BBS's, and I'm glad that there are still FTN and QWK networks around today. I ran a hub for a few networks in my area, and was quite active. When the internet came about, I supplemented that with USENET newsgroups (there were a few for both my local city and my university that were very active, and I still see some of those old folks posting in there on Google Groups). The thing about Echomail is that, again, the technology was a kludge. Someone posts a dozen messages, and then after they log off the board, the messages get tossed into a packet and sent to a hub (assuming the Hub isn't busy). Hub passes along to more hubgs, message gets sent. Eventually, after a day or so, the message may be on the other side of your country. People you're discussing politics or food or pets or teenage crap (like me) with might respond, and you'll continue again the next day. If your cohorts are in the same local area, you might have three-or-four back-and-forth chats on echomail a day. Now, back to the 80x25 or 80x50 screens many, many people used in the day, long messages like the one I'm typing here were also more of an exception. People tended to keep messages to a paragraph or two, with quotes, because there was just not a lot of screen space for many, many lines of messages. And that's just for people using offline readers - trying to use even a full-screen reader or editor on a BBS was painful at 2400bps and barely adequate at 14.4k. The result was that many echomail conversations were quite easy to follow, lasted for weeks, and included a lot of sparse comments. For people with ADHD like me, that was great. I also remember a lot of politics among Sysops in FTN networks, especially near the end of my tenure as a sysop (around 1995/1996). It got to the point where the most active echomail areas were the sysop- only areas, and the predominant conversations were around what rules to put in place for routing echomail in conferences that nobody was participating in anymore because the whole community became incredibly toxic and people were moving to USEnet and AOL. Nowadays, though, we have something that, in my mind, mimics what echomail did back then, but is much better in almost every way: Reddit. A subreddit is very much like an echomail area. It has a specific topic, and it has moderators. New topics start up with lots of comments on those topics (what used to be "replies" in Echomail land). Only now, when you post something, the person you were responding to can get it immediately. They can also have formatting, and hyperlinks. Editing in Reddit is far easier than even the best QWK reader allowed-for. And reading is a lot easier, especially with large monitors. Some subreddits even have "regulars" that you chat with, just like the old days. I'm a huge Canadian Football fan, so /r/CFL is a big go-to place for me. There is quite a good group of people we would call "family" in there, because we chat all the time. 2/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- G_Porgie · 2020-01-29 21:00 > Instant Messaging/Chat - There were entire huge multi-node boards entirely devoted to this, and even a single node board at least had sysop chat usually This was really one of the first things that the internet brought to the table in a much better form than BBS's ever possibly could. IRC was the first nail in the coffin, ICQ, MSN, Facebook Chat, Skype, Facetime, and the endless list of web-based chatrooms that exist just beat the idea of multi-node chat to death. Multi-node chat was great because it was novel. Now it's just something everyone can do everywhere. > Games - Door games, mail/message games, offline sync'd games Door games were great for what they were. But even in the BBS days, they paled in comparison to the stand-alone interactive games of the day. Most games had limited "turns" and were text-based simply because of the slow nature of the technology and the fact that most BBS's didn't have multiple-nodes, so users' time had to be rationed. LORD was great at implementing this genre by being a game people played for 15-20 minutes a day per game, but it didn't translate well to the modern internet (though the LOTGD website was an awesome re-make of that game) because the social aspect that went along with it became very diluted. The other thing about most doors is that they were made to be played in a one-at-a-time fashion (with very few exceptions). Even those games that had multi-node awareness (WorldGroup versions of TLORD and TW2002) didn't really do much with it other than have player-vs-player battles that resembled player-vs-CPU battles. Let's not forget what happened when GameServer on WorldGroup became a huge thing. All of a sudden door games were giving way to multi-player games of DOOM. Something people didn't even imagine before. Now, of course, those games connect to specialty, central servers, and the game play is completely lag-free. > Timelines/Walls - Lots of plug-ins for this type stuff to leave short messages, shouts, etc. Now we have Facebook and Twitter, which is basically the same thing, but real-time, international, and includes enhancements like hyperlinks, video, photos, etc. > Time Management - Not necessarily a good thing, but on some boards you could bank time. The idea that a telnet BBS would even institute a user daily time- limit in the modern age is pretty weird. Back then, again, user time was limited because most BBS's only supported one user, "big" BBS's supported maybe a couple dozen at a time, so managing resources was a must. Nowadays, you could implement a telnet board with 1000 nodes and they could all be in use without any detriment to users (assuming that the underlying technology is modern, not just old BBS software running under DOSBox). > The #1 thing about BBSs is at least for the better, BBSs, they tended to be more restrictive and served as great content filters. If you were an idiot, you simply could not join or got banned. That is a very romanticized version of the kind of elitism we saw on BBS's back in the day. While I do recall a lot of users getting banned, a lot of the times it wasn't because they were "idiots", it was because the sysop just didn't like them for some reason. It was all actually very petty. Nowadays, of course, you don't see too many "idiots" on BBS's, just because everyone that's left are all older Gen-Xers like us who have grown out of that kind of thing. It is good to remember that, back then, many of us were teenagers. 3/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lubujackson · 2020-01-29 23:46 I have noticed a constant trend of redoing old protocols over and over. Like how Slack is basically just IRC for businesses. There are some things that BBSes did uniquely that I don't think have been replicated (well) yet. Local communities (via area codes, due to phone costs) with semi- anonymity. It was a great balance for meeting people online that could reasonably meet up offline. Nothing has really come close to making a good system for local interactions, especially for "just chatting" and I think the semi-anonymity is key. Multiple boards per area, as many as anyone wants to make, with custom designs and personal and expressive themes. Especially for teens, there isn't a social and easily personalizable area since MySpace. Sure, you can make a YouTube channel or Instagram page, but it is always clear you are just another user. BBSes allowed a ton of freedom in what they served, who was allowed to see it, the design of every menu and interaction and each sysop had power over their visitors. Yes, this often turned into a hellscape of edgelords but it was also an empowering way for young kids to work out power dynamics in a mostly private and opt-in way. Some services like Mastodon let you create chat areas to a degree but I really think there should be an ugly, blinking text, sparkle background MySpace-like corner of the Web that is preferably never indexed by Google but findable by word of mouth. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sygo · 2020-01-30 15:59 Picking up on your iterative view of IT platforms, which I totally agree with, what you describe sounds like your typical corporate intranet where all of those services exist in some form or another (from file sharing, to interest group areas, chat and collaboration, all the way to your own personal user page that looks like a distilled-to-boredom myspace page). There's the huge difference that folks don't get to opt-in, the sysadmin creates your AD account and ta-da, you're in this forced socio-professional network that you're not allowed to leave, and that leads me to my actual point: I feel that in 2020 you can totally start a BBS, load it with all the doors and games and shout-walls and all that good jazz, but much like in the 80's to mid 90's what will make or break a BBS is a tight knit community of users that literally goes out of their way to communicate with each other. As u/arcadeshopper stated earlier in this thread, a board can have all of the games, curated file lists, what-have-you, but without that tight knit community logging in every day, there is little sense of reward for the sysop, boards take months to set up, stay up for 8 months and die out. One thing certainly hasn't changed: being a sysop is a labor of love and if it's not reciprocated it dies. And you're also spot-on with Mastodon, which I'm assuming you're referring to the SDF Public Access Unix System, I've been a user there for over 15 years and I log in a few times a week (sometimes I don't log in for months, though) and it's the closest representation I've seen of that sort of community, it's not a BBS, but it's not pretending to be one either. There's a lot to be said about self-governing communities, having a sysop/sysgod/edgelord that keeps a community in check is probably not very palatable for a lot of folks, in the age of "f you, it's **my** twitter account, block me!". If there's something I can see succeed for a BBS in 2020 is having a niche user-group, I remember in the early 90's I stopped dialing 'generic' BBSs after I got into the underground BBS scene, I was looking for hacking tutorials, warez, a better war-dialer (always a better war-dialer) and message groups that were often not syndicated, they pertained to that board and included only that board's users. That's where the value was for me as a 15 year old. We can find similar services everywhere, what we can't find is a sense of community in a user-base. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2020-01-31 16:48 I'd love to see that. It would instantly go up on /r/htmlhorror. But the closest I've seen that is not [sdf.org](https://sdf.org) or github pages is [https://tildeverse.org/](https://tildeverse.org/) just nothing as "simple" as myspace / geocities was though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- doctorfastin · 2020-01-31 19:44 Wow. You guys were just who I was looking for. I found this site by accident looking for help setting up my old BBS from the 80's and 90's. I retired from 25 years in the internet biz. Before that I was a sysop and worked in the health care biz. After I retired I stayed away from IT from burnout and information overload. I could not stay away long though. Nostalgia got the best of me and I started looking into ways to bring my old BBS back to life. I think what I missed was the camaraderie and collaboration of Sysops back in the day. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2020-01-31 19:49 A lot of us share that same experience so welcome to the subreddit and to the community. I haven't setup a call in conference for the group yet, but if one has a board feel free to post it and we'll be glad to pop by to say hi. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DVinson68 · 2020-02-06 17:56 All 4 of my BBS' offer all of what you mentioned. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DVinson68 · 2020-02-06 17:59 Or any of the other myriad echo nets out there.