BBS Users? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swolf154 · 2020-04-14 14:20 I've noticed BBS users are also SysOps. That said how do we get new users interested in the BBS scene? Seems to me SysOps are hardly "New Users". [Havens BBS](http://havens.synchro.net) ​ [Havens BBS](https://preview.redd.it/ucg4d4qhlss41.png?width=1024&form at=png&auto=webp&s=7a46fdf2748e67a35a1cd0dabaddcb67dcff16e1) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- samalex01 · 2020-04-14 15:20 This is the biggest issue with BBSing today, everyone wants to run their own board so most do. It's just so easy to stand up a board now'days unlike back in the 80's and 90's. Back then you needed dedicated hardware, a modem, phone like, and software, all of which costs lots of money. Now anyone can use any old POS system and stand up a BBS on their cable modem or grab a $10/month Linode vm and do it there too. And software is free. So anyone can be a Sysop running a stock board in an hour or two. I do miss the days when a true Sysop was a guru who knew his system and the tech inside out... in our community in the late 80's we had well over 60 BBSes but hundreds of users. I still have some printouts of user lists from some of those BBSes, and they were pages upon pages. Now a Telnet/SSH board might get a hand full of nostalgic callers that connect once or twice to scratch the itch and move on. Few become regular BBS users. Personally I do have a stock board setup just to play with, but I try to all as many boards as I can though I can't say one is my dedicated point of access to the BBS world. I really hoped with the rise of Minecraft and other 8-bit style blocky games the BBS layout would become a fun way for younger folks to get into computing -- but it never happened. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nevarro · 2020-04-14 17:25 I believe a significant barrier to entry is the lengthy signup process that is seen on most BBSes that require alot of personal information. While I understand some of this information may be needed for message networks (real name, birth date), password retrieval (email address) and last callers (city, state), I don't feel comfortable providing that information. I know a possible way around that is to enter fake information, but (younger) people not familiar with BBSes will not necessarily assume that. Also, some boards I've seen tell you that if you don't enter your REAL personal information, they will IP block you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mixedliquor · 2020-04-14 17:50 I’ve been introducing my son to text based games such as MUDs and BBSes. In terms of peers, very few people are interested in these older technologies. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UnaClocker · 2020-04-14 19:13 Well I use BBS’s daily and haven’t set up my own board. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ozznixon · 2020-04-15 00:52 A handful of us are working on a social media site - gearing it toward the old technologies, however, adding the ability to use a web telnet on your "My Page" section just for sysops to promote to visitors. The site is more Follower oriented than Friends networking. This week, we are actually working on the "Forum" section to use all of the JAM message bases for Fidonet, then we add all of the other networks to it. Most of the foundation is in place, thus, why I even mention it - but, we are about 2 to 3 weeks away from splashing it all over the net - thinking of a 4/20 go-live... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- legacykrew · 2020-04-15 01:25 If users have never logged onto BBSes before, it's really difficult to turn them on to it if everything setup on there is for the nostalgic sensibilities of the Sysop. You need to provide some modern amenities on your board or have a theme that you can build a community off of. The biggest aspect is for the Sysop to be proactive. Many boards come and go because a lot of sysops just leave it on remote control and feel that just because they build it, that people will come. Everyone still needs to do their part in advertising their boards and be involved on your own Bulletin Board Systems. It so much more inviting to log on a system where the sysop is actually on there to post message, respond to inquiries, and even play door games on his/her own board. I find too many NEW sysops who are just lazy users that don't want to log onto other BBSes and they just want to read and post messages to a network on their own personal BBS. If that's the case, just be a user and not a sysop. Those same sysops don't even advertise and their boards are default out of the box installs with no passion applied to their boards. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MashimaroG4 · 2020-04-15 05:20 If you want new people you have to offer something more than nostalgia, as new people by definition won't have it. While I enjoy some door games and I certainly miss the small message board exchanges from those days, most of these functions are done by the internet now. What kind of things do you think would appeal to a 25 year old who never used a BBS as a kid? Or for that matter to a 50 year old who used them as a young adult, but now can do all those tasks via WWW? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wndrbr3d · 2020-04-15 12:10 This topic is posted here about once every month or so. The problem is, to rephrase it to a different medium, we're asking: "How do we get more people interested in AM Radio?" The fact of the matter is, time has moved on, technology has introduced far better options, and there's no culture around BBS anymore. Let's break this down. 1. Technology - Just as with AM Radio, today there is FM, Satellite, and Streaming Services which provide a greater variety as well as much, much higher quality. Same with BBS' in every sense -- there are much more effective, real-time communication platforms and computer games are much more in-depth (graphically as well as plot wise) than most BBS games. 2. Culture - BBS was a thing because it was the first viable way for anyone to communicate over a digital medium with other people (and with multi-line boards in real-time!). These days you have Social Media Platforms, Instant Messaging, Text Messaging, Voice Chat Platforms, etc. If I want to chat with my friend "Bob", we don't have to get on a BBS at a same time. I can just text him. At the end of the day, we have to come to terms and not confuse our nostalgia with hype. Have any of you sat down and tried to watch the original "Blade Runner" with anyone under 30 recently? They think it's terrible! And in a modern context, it is. It's slow paced, has a confusing plot, and the visuals compared to modern standards are C- at best. But when it came out in 1982 it blew everyone's mind! The concept of Cyberpunk didn't even exist and it was this new genres of Sci-Fi. The flyover scene of Los Angeles was incredible!... at the time. "Blade Runner" was a movie for its time, and those of us that were impacted by it remember it fondly for the context in which we saw it. Same goes for BBS's. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OldSchoolBBSer · 2020-04-15 14:16 Ha! Truth. Back then around here it was often BS info unless you knew the sysop in person or was mandated by something like a school system. I distinctly remember bogus info and a healthy distrust being encouraged in the culture around here (as a good thing, not a problem to be fixed). I still don't know half the real names of the friends I had enjoyed back then. Just a handle, and even then with an assumption that I was actually talking to a friend of theirs that had hacked their account and was pranking. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2020-04-16 06:33 I do not know it can be resuscitated. The motivation for putting up a board now is anything but forward-looking. In the pursuit of nostalgia, people have created some truly impressive-looking systems, but accessing a board is still a few steps removed from the ease of access of most Internet services people currently use: * To do it right you're probably going to want to install a custom client like Syncterm. * You're probably going to be limited to not having very much information on the screen at once. I'm starting to think I'm the only one who feels like this but boards feel incredibly claustrophobic to me. A few weeks ago I telnetted right from the Linux shell to a GBBS Pro system with my term fullscreened, like 200 columns wide and I don't know how many lines deep. It was glorious. * A lot of boards still ask too much personal information to log on. I really don't understand this - people can do what they like on their own systems, and I realize some packages don't let you disable all of the new user questions, but some boards are snoopy beyond reason. * Most BBS stuff online, like here, is BBSing for BBSers. I am unsure how to do outreach to people who have never heard of a board. It is always nice when some young person comes on who is interested because of computing history, but I suspect there are people out there who'd like boards, and door games, and so on, just for their own merits. Outreach has been hard. * A lot of people are not used to a primarily textual medium. The richness of the Web exceeded - for me at least - all expectations. A lot is gained from that, but something is lost, too. Media richness is one of several reasons why Discord is replacing IRC (for now) as well. I think there is something to be said for plain text, but this is sometimes a hard sell. I have always hated emoji. I'm old and in the minority on this I fear. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nevarro · 2020-04-16 17:44 You make a good point, sir. However, I believe there is a culture around BBSes as such evidenced by this subreddit. But, it is a comparatively small and aging culture. We would all love to see younger people take an interest in BBSing, because it really is a rich, fun and multifaceted hobby from amazing ANSI artwork to message networks to door games to file systems. But, like you said, much of the practical use BBSes have/had have been replaced and improved upon by Internet based technology over the years rendering the original functionality inconvenient at best. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DVinson68 · 2020-04-16 21:12 Which networks are you planning on carrying? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DVinson68 · 2020-04-16 21:21 >A lot of boards still ask too much personal information to log on. I really don't understand this - people can do what they like on their own systems, and I realize some packages don't let you disable all of the new user questions, but some boards are snoopy beyond reason. That is for legal reasons. At the end of the day the sysop is responsible for what goes on on their systems. If someone is posting/uploading illegal stuff then you have to be able to give proper information to the authorities or face things happening like what happened with the Steve Jackson Games BBS and the DOJ. That being said, the vast majority of that "Personal" information is ONLY seen by the sysop, and also information that is publically available on most all search engines; or the people end up sharing themselves on most social media. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wndrbr3d · 2020-04-17 00:37 This is the largest, single BBS related community I know of on the internet and it has 3,000 subs. For comparison, the Adult Diaper Fetish subreddit has 10x more. While, even my personal projects support keeping it alive for as long as possible, we have to just accept that its time has passed and we can keep it alive for nostalgia but not kid ourselves that there's any revival to be had. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ozznixon · 2020-04-17 03:37 Fidonet, Araknet, Zeronet and FSXNet are currently on my BBS and tis SMS uses my BBS message areas, and file area, then any other networks (FSC01, EMSI, BINKP based), these are all already available on my BBS server too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 4_bit_forever · 2020-04-22 09:17 The only way your going to get people interested is of you can get some sexy coverage on YouTube. Hey a popular YouTuber to make videos about it and they'll come in droves. Also, have interesting content! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mmunson · 2020-04-23 20:57 I keep things fair and simple. If you do not want to put mostly true information, you are not going to get fidonet posting access. However I will give you access to the rest of the system with little or no issue. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mmunson · 2020-04-24 01:03 It was a pain trying to get former users i had in 1996-1997 to come back in 1999. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swolf154 · 2020-04-28 21:15 Thanks for your input. I enjoy hearing what fellow BBSers have to say. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swolf154 · 2020-04-28 21:16 We need more users. Not SysOps. ;-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swolf154 · 2020-04-28 21:18 There's nothing new about a BBS. I'd like to see users become more active in the Message Areas. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swolf154 · 2020-04-28 21:22 Are you suggesting I put porn on my BBS?? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 4_bit_forever · 2020-04-28 23:41 Ha! No.... But that would draw traffic! Worked for every big BBS back in the day, and works for every big website today. I've thing you could do is host classic BBS softporn files from back in the day! I've got a pretty good size collection of them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sixfourfromthefloor · 2020-05-08 18:49 It was already a very niche hobby back in the day and there really isn't anything a BBS can offer these days. It's like going back to an 8-track, sure it's nostalgic if you used one, but there just isn't a reason to resurrect such old technology for any new purpose. Trust me, I invested deeply into my BBS, even providing Internet access to paying members in the mid-90's (I was charging $1/min for pretty much text based www, gopher, ftp, etc..) but there was no chance for survival once the WWW took off. It is unfortunate but that's the way it goes. You might find the odd person who has an interest in weird old tech but for the most part it's just us (ex sysops/co-sysops) living in the past. Again, my BBS was everything to me back in the day and nobody would like to see a resurrection more than I would. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swolf154 · 2020-07-10 14:28 Minimal Sign up on Havens BBS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swolf154 · 2020-07-10 14:29 Some Sysops are butt heads. I agree.