ECHO TALK
BBSes on the Internet

ECHO TALK
Food for thought from Fido's echomail.
Purloined without permission by D Myers

Ed Williams presents a different view on the subject of BBSes on the Internet. This is extracted from his message to Lynda Kendrick in the echo FN_SYSOP.

LK> Ed, I enjoyed reading your message about how we as BBS
LK> sysop's do have a way of joining the Internet with our BBS's
LK> ..But how do we do that? I am very interested!

Joining the Internet with our BBS's......ME? I would never propose such a thing, for various reasons. A few of which I'll touch on below.

Anyone who hitches their proverbial "Star" to the Internet is in for a sad awakening in a few years. As communications systems become more and more evolved, the phone systems will take on a considerable appeal, and well the Internet will be your "junk mail" drawer again, but I will grant you it will be a neat one.

The "traditional dial up" phone line will be around for quite some time. The rates and way we do things will change dramatically I'm sure. But the internet is what it is, and it's not a phone service.

I laugh at the memories now, of people complaining that for all it's glory, windows 3.1 is just a shell for DOS.

Much the same thing can be said for what "people" are doing with the internet. For all it's wonders, it's just a shell for the phone companies. Once it makes that change over to an "independent" system, well the world's going to see a huge improvement over the internet.

There's just too much wrong with it now, and the things wrong with it for us BBS's are just not in the interests of those people making the Internet. XML has promise for what us BBS'ers want, but it's not quite the same, and it's applications are far from a menu driven programming language.

While I do believe that the Internet is a wondrous place for "artists, businesses, tech support, and scientific exchange", we have polluted it with enough "Crap" that these gem's are increasingly hard to find. All too often someone goes to the net to find one thing, and ends up being distracted by half a dozen others. Before he knows it, he's out of time, the kids are begging to be tucked in, and life has passed him by.

It's not people's fault really. Heck even trying to find a tech support answer on the net takes longer to find on the net (that's if you know the address to look at) than it would to just call up their phone support systems. But we foolishly believe the promise of quick and easy tech support, and yet we wait for E-Mails 2-3 day's out with our answer. I'd like to see anyone wait 2-3 day's on the phone.

So as I was saying, it's not their fault, we as people have a variety of things we find interesting, and the Internet can bring bits and pieces of almost all of them at once. Say you're interested in Jupiter, you could spend a year searching all of the jupiter stuff and get no where. We foolishly believe that as long as we look a little, we understand enough of the topic to satisfy our interest. But we get half hazard information in bits and pieces that never quite make sense, no one help's us to sort out really or discusses with us, and keep looking or give up the search. We are being molded to put up with crap.

BBS's though do not play that silly little game with our callers minds. Not a bit. We keep to a single topic or two for our BBS's, we have several people helping us keep track of the latest news, people who meet, chat, write messages regularly, and more.

Instead of throwing "info" at people, we put them into "interest communities". And who cares if a BBS doesn't have "Everything you ever needed to know about subject A", someone, maybe you can get new stuff, discuss it and share it with the same people who are not being constantly distracted by the maze of "info bits" out there in Interpolated.

Every Sysop who uses the Internet to run a BBS on, and does not provide a "Dial up Connection" is a sysop with a constantly roving clientele. Regardless of whether he runs a fine BBS or a sloppy one. This may be interesting, but it is not why people call BBS's.

Beware the Borg, they have nifty technology, but they have no souls.

BBS's are wondrous things, which I predict will blossom over the next few years, and as technology improves, people move farther and farther out into the country side, and work at home becomes a larger standard, and the service industry takes hold, that nearly everyone will run a BBS of some type. But they'll probably settle for a nifty "Phone Banner" menu for the most part.

I love technology, I love what it will do for us. But this internet thing isn't where BBS's need to be getting "callers" from. Advertise it there, use it to get software easily distributed to call your BBS, put newsletters there so people can check it from any computer quickly. But don't get users from the net, get them when they're at home, on their own computer, and want to be on your system.
