Subj : Re: hackers To : Oli From : DustCouncil Date : Tue Jan 17 2023 07:19 pm Ol> There are websites with and without user accounts. Web is just another Ol> interface. And that is exactly my point. Make BBSs as open and easily Ol> accessible as a website. I sort of wish we lived in a world in which gates and fences were not necessary at all. And yeah, I'm about to say, "but we don't live in that world," but that's not important here. It bugs me, and I'm not going to get over it, the degree to which, under a cloak of anonymity, people choose to do damage, be it spamming, or abuse, or trying to crash/destroy a system. I often wonder what the whole of the Internet would look like if all of the people who spent time causing problems instead tried to contribute or build something. Most people seem to have accepted reality. To deal with troublemakers, we've had to spend time making spam filters, implementing captchas, multifactor authentication, and all manner of other things. There seems to be a kind of impunity with which people create havoc which has always irritated me. The Internet is a *miracle*. To me, it is something approaching sacred. That people treat it as badly as they do frankly makes me angry and I'm not getting over it and I'm not getting past it. Serious question for everyone: has anyone stopped being amazed, that this exists? That there is an *endless* amount of information out there to dig through, music and video to check out, websites, blogs, and so on? I have not stopped being amazed. I take none of this for granted. As for my BBS: No one cares about or calls my board; it is, as you indicate elsewhere, a kind of "toy" of mine. I put it up for one reason: I got sick and tired of two trends on other boards: 1. Ask me ten billion personal questions to get an account. No. You don't need to know my gender or birthdate, or residential address, full stop. Real name I groan and live with since Fidonet insists on it, but I'd gladly do away with that too if I didn't carry Fidonet (and sometimes I wonder why I do.) 2. Ridiculously short timeouts, as if resources were limited, like you had phone lines that might stay busy, locking callers out, if people idled (and fair enough, there are still boards like that - retrosystems that can only take a single caller at a time, or people still running actual dial-up). My board lets people idle for a long time, so they can get up and get a sandwich, answer a phone call, or start a UFO cult, and then come back and continue where they left off. I idle for hours at a time, and it feels right. I do that on my various shell systems, IRC, reddit...only my banks time me out. I actually agree that it is optimal that people should be able to check out a board before applying for an account and providing all of the personal information people ask for. Most boards are not very unique (mine isn't, no flex here) - we routinely call out the folks who put a lot of time into their systems, and rightly so. But there are also countless unmodded out-of-the-box Synchronets out there, for example (Mystics too). They exist for valid reasons I'm sure, but I get a little irritated when I take time to apply for an account only to find out the system is an unmodded board carrying Fidonet and fsxNet, and offering nothing else. It's not that I have a problem with those boards; I just wish I knew that before I took the time to apply. I don't think this is actually under debate here, but obviously it follows that people can do whatever they please with their own boards, and be as invasive or locked down as they like or require anything they like. I'm not saying what people ought to feel compelled to do. It's just not optimal for me. It's user-hostile. It wastes time. --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64) * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (21:1/227) .