I'm a member of the ISCA BBS; in days of yore, this stood for the [University of] Iowa Student Computer Association, though ties with its namesake were broken about a decade ago. In its heyday in the early 90's, the ISCA often had 1300+ simultaneous users online, and hundreds more queued to get on, only limited by the lowly T1 and the HP DOMAIN Unix system on which it ran.
In the years since, usage has dropped and at any given moment, there may be 10 or 20 concurrent users. As one might guess, the appeal of a text-based Citadel BBS doesn't have the same draw that it did 20+ years ago. Despite this, it's still very much a live (though dramatically diminished) system. I am sure that there are still those "out there" who no doubt would enjoy a trip to retroville, and an infusion of fresh blood would be fun for all.
So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to go out and get them? I'd be willing to throw some money at it if I thought the odds of success were reasonable.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kilo110 on Monday July 20 2015, @04:20PM
Spread the word. Go to various technically-inclined forums and sites and make a thread inviting people to give it a shot. I'm sure there are many people that might be interested but have no idea these bbs exist.
Also make a blog/site/thread with a guide on how to set up a client along with some newbie tutorials and maintain a list of active servers. That'll go a long way to making these more accessible.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @04:21PM
Building a community of any sort is not an easy task. It requires active cultivation, and maintenance; problems and drama will occur and you need to be on deck to make things better. BBSes of any sort are something of a hard sell; aside from the retro factor, there isn't a whole lot thats appealing to them for most users. I've had a SDF account for ages, and I can't remember the last time I actually used it for anything. Here's some reason ideas I can think of:
* Schedule events of some sort, and adverise them around, perhaps on a USENET group or on reddit, or here (though we may not run it unless its a slow news day)
* Provide something unique; ISCA sounds like it has quite a bit of history attached to it, outlining it on your site would help
* I haven't heard of HP DOMAIN before; I doubt you're still running on that, but if you are, perhaps give a history lesson or such? Most of the antique UNIXes have basically vanished, some lost to history.
* Make sure you have easy to use venues for communication. Reddit group is an idea, web gateway to whatever is built in to ISCA BBS? (most BBSes had support for USENET, and there's quite a bit of NNTP web stuff around. May be worth setting up INN, setting up ISCA's USENET reader if it has it, and then pointing a web interface at that to get everything on the same page). Setting up INN isn't hard but a lot of it isn't well documented, and you need to know how USENET works to create the necessary control messages.
Still always moving
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @04:29PM
Ok, I actually took a moment and made an account, here's a bit more advice:
* Drop manual user validation. You're not going to have a huge spam problem with a BBS, and creating barriers to participation won't help you at all
* Its not obvious where I can go to discuss things. There are a LOT of forums and none of them obvious where people are hanging out
* I get hangs if I press a wrong key, and the help has options that I obviously shouldn't have access to like debug
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @06:23PM
I am going to guess you were not a child of the 80s, based on your assumptions and advice. I can't think of any BBSes that had access to usenet. That came near their end, often via add-ons that tricked the BBS into accepting the data as new forum posts. A few software packages had fidonet and usenet and such as integrated options, but it was rare to even see BBS's with shared message forums, allowing communication between nodes on what would be a private network among other boards a SysOp was friends or did business with.
Anyway, this forum is not much different from a BBS when it comes down to it. Facebook used to be very similar to a board, especially with the earlier doors/online games they had. Mafia Wars was really no different than the typical "pimp wars" or "max headroom" or "leech" types of doors, where you get so many turns a day, get so many points/dollars to spend on upgrades and armor (ansi porno pic, electromagnetic ferris buellerite shielding for the modem, pimp vision sunglasses...)and then log in again tomorrow to play again. Too bad FB became what it became.
One of the popular BBS packages that saw a lot of unpermitted modification and customization was the "Forum" software -- which lead to the creation of a number of "forum hacks". Later on as speeds improved, it became less popular and other software types for boards prevaled; multi-line BBSes being someone in their own niche due to some being essentially an IM client at 300 bps and numerous lines, and others being giant boards using networked storage to provide huge file bases and so on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @07:03PM
I was born in '88, so I wasn't around for the "golden age" of BBSes. My earliest computing experiences was via a shell account on a SGI IRIX box at my dad's work I could dial into called brenner. Pretty sure someone plugged it in ages ago and never removed it; I don't ever remember anyone showing up with 'who', though I occassionally chatted with the sysadmin via mail.
My parents eventually got AOL, and with it, and Windows 95, I was able to use winsock applications for the first time. Later we also got CompuServe due to actually needing to be able to do PPP from non-Windows machines (!go pppconnect for anyone who remembers), as I was using OS/2 Warp at the time. I'd played with FreeBSD but it wasn't until some time later I even experimented with Linux, and it was several years later I actually switched fulltime.
At that time, it was still possible to use the text interface on CIS to browse the forms. As such, most of my impressions of BBSes come from CompuServe, and not the general BBSes users here might be familiar with. I must be honest though, part of me is somewhat nogistic for the days of using Procomm Plus for DOS on a secondhand laptop (which could barely run Windows 3.1).
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @07:41PM
Alright, you are forgiven. However, you are an influential member of this site as well as elsewhere, and sometimes you make statements that can be perceived as fact by others, but may not be accurate (consider the dwarf guides--lots of well thought out ideas, but with some details that were not accurate.) Many people are happy to help or correct an issue, but the presentation is important--stating things as true when they are not can get one in trouble.
I wouldn't want you to have good ideas that get derailed by other people's facts!
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @08:06PM
I probably should change my signature to say "Can be wrong, corrections welcome" ... I did manage to figure out how to use the ISCA BBS after some trial and error, I was chatting in Babble> for awhile.
That being said, I'm slightly suprised since I can't imagine that many people frequent /r/dwarffortress or Bay12 and here to know that I wrote a military guide for DF :P. Looking at my last message, I also realized I wrote OS/2 Warp which isn't right. I used OS/2 2.1, installed from 29 floppy disks (and frequently needed to reinsert 23 of them whenever you changed system settings).
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by Grayson on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:08PM
> * Drop manual user validation. You're not going to have a huge spam problem with a BBS, and creating barriers to participation won't help you at all
I agree with this one. However I doubt that is the primary barrier, as I doubt most people even make it that far. (longtime user of ISCABBS here).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:52AM
HP DOMAIN is probably referring to Apollo Computer's Domain/OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS [wikipedia.org]).
I was fortunate enough to have used both Multics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics [wikipedia.org]) and Domain/OS. While not perfect, both systems were a joy to use.
I am forever indebted to those who were involved developing these systems. I attribute much of my success from the lessons that I learned while I had access to these wonderful environments.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EQ on Monday July 20 2015, @04:32PM
Nyx [nyx.net] is a similar community with similar challenges in Denver. And they have been around forever
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday July 20 2015, @07:00PM
I'd push the "we're not the web" angle hard and make it appeal to bearded hipster millennials trying desperately to stay outside the mainstream. These are niche sites, really, so there's not a huge audience for them. But the right people will be interested. (I should know about niche: I started my own hierarchy on Usenet - dictator.* and run a gopher site. And I'm looking seriously into starting up a fidonet site. Just to explore). Anyway, there are others like me out there, and we think BBSes are cool and maybe even cooler than ever now that we know that every government spy agency is profiling our asses six ways to sunday.
By the way, there are dozens of Usenet groups that focus on BBSes, like alt.bbs.synchronet and the like. You ought to make your pitch over there, to all of them, as people who like BBSes and people who like Usenet intersect dramatically in the Venn diagram, if you know what i mean.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday July 20 2015, @07:08PM
Just poking around a bit, looks like alt.bbs.lists would be a good place to get publicity and perhaps meet other sysops who would be willing to help get the word out. They're almost certainly in the same boat as you, if not worse.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @10:00PM
What, if any, news servers carry your hierarchy? If I can ever get around to it, I'd love to see a soylentnews.* heirarchy. I experimented with it awhile ago, but never got it working reliably (though I knew how to fix it, just never did it).
Also, the SoylentNews gopher server has been partially coded for half a year at this point. I might finish it this year.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Sunday July 26 2015, @08:46PM
The Dictator hierarchy is now being carried by Individual.net/Individual.de,
probably one of the best respected news providers. Again, we've got great
coverage via German NSPs! Thanks to to Datemas.de, Weretis.net and Solani.org,
up. Thanks as well to the folks at Albasani.net and mccarragher.net who got
the ball rolling. Also carrying our groups are blocknews.net, hitnews.com,
newsgroupdirect.com, altopia.com, glorb.net, usenetnow.net, XSnews.nl,
tweaknews.nl, newshosting.com, readnews.com, cambriumusenet.nl, weretis.net,
highwinds, eweka.nl, usenetmonster.com, and forteinc.com newservers.
But kudos mostly to the folks at weretis/solani and albasani, who really got the ball rolling. Once someone connected to highwinds takes on your hierarchy, good things happen. I got a lot of good help on the newsgroup news.hierarchies. But I have yet to get either AIOE or eternal-september to take on the dictator hierarchy, and those two are important given they are free and have a huge number of users.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:26AM
Another angle to focus on is that there's quite a few people that are now in their 30s (like me) that were initially active on BBSes or the Old Internet in the early-mid 1990s and recall it as a kind of unspoiled paradise compared to the troll-filled commercialized visually-oriented Web. It's not that different from the growing interest in games that are either from the 8/16-bit eras or are designed to seem as if they are.
(Score: 1) by Slartibartfast on Monday July 27 2015, @09:52PM
Awesome ideas! Thanks!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @07:01PM
Reddit has /r/bbs, so information there would be good. Also, FidoNet and the like are still active and have BBS ad bases.
There are things like fTelnet that make BBS's more accessible to those that do not wish to setup a telnet client as well
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:46AM
the /bbs subreddit is full of nobodys and wannabees. they dont know jack about running bbses
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Monday July 20 2015, @08:33PM
I've occasionally wondered (purely idly) what it would take to get FIDO up and running with TCP sessions emulating modem connections (including for batch transfers).
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @09:56PM
Fido supports "OtherNets", but Wikipedia suggests the original Fidonet is still alive and kicking. A brief Googling didn't show anything, but there's got to be at least a few nodes still around connected to each zone.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 22 2015, @09:01PM
It took some digging, but I found this [telnetbbsguide.com].
In between, I found a lot of dead links and even a webring full of dead and nearly dead links.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 20 2015, @08:37PM
I'm a mod on a somewhat similar site. We never had the numbers that you had on your board, but we did have an active membership for quite a long while. It became apparent that younger poeple weren't much interested in our board. Then, some of the staff started dying off. Membership declined for various reasons, including the fact that some of the most popular staff were gone. Our site is still up today, but it's little more than an echo chamber for some - uhhhh - CHALLENGED - person from Syracuse. That boy always wanted to be a moderator - and he's STILL not a moderator today. He may be the only person to post on the forum for a month, but he still can't moderate. Heh. I guess I'll have to wander over, look in, and see what sort of stuff he's up to this month.
www.mauisun.org/vbb
If you wander over to look at it, you'll have to register to get inside. That wsa a defense against spammers, back in the day - no posting, no reading, no nothing until you're registered. Admin should probably take that down now - spammers have forgotten all about vbb boards.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @08:42PM
And of course for the retro/nostalgia crowd with grey beards!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS_Documentary [wikipedia.org] (cc by-sa)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:04AM
Usenetbwith uucp and a 9600 baud modemt was a lot more useful and fun for me than waiting for yet another copy of jQuery to download over a cable modem.
There are lots of newsservers one may pay ten bucks a month for high speed encrypted feeds but their terms of service always forbid passing your feed onto others. Thats not what usenet is for.
However there are still a very few nntp servers that are free if charge and that do not serve binaries. You dont need all the newsgroups, only those you and your friends, family, schoolmates or colleagues want to read or post to.
Look at it this way: tracking pixels dont work in plain text messages.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:52AM
www.eternal-september.org -- Non-binary text-only nntp feeds.
And I2P has a seperate private nntp feed. Possibly a few.
Povray.org also has a private nntp feed (non-redistributable) for all aspects of povray use and development.
(Score: 1) by gozar on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:25AM
I've looked at this a lot over the years. What is needed is a good USENET web app. There have been a couple of projects, but nothing that really succeeded into bring USENET into the web era. I'm shocked how many people use forums, which are just terrible to read/follow compared to a good USENET reader. Look at Reddit, just terrible.
Discourse [discourse.org] is a pretty decent attempt at fixing the forum issue but it's still not ideal.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday July 22 2015, @07:09AM
It would be possible to attach rehash as a frontend to USENET, given the underlying work we've done for nexuses and such. If I ever get the bidirectional gateway coded, it would be interesting to take say comp.misc and feed it into the database.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday July 22 2015, @10:06PM
The barrier to entry for new folks to BBSes is non-trivial. There would need to be prevalent guides about the history of BBSes, why one would still want to use a BBS, how to dial one up today, how one uses a BBS after dialing up, how to sign up/in, how to use the message board, and how to set up your own BBS.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!