i think he just called a few boards. to the best of my knowledge [which i keep track of our bbs scene] he has not called many boards or been active at all.

i stand by what i said, but i should have cranked it down a knotch.

thanks,

jas

and he is NOT authority on bbses.

this guy is a noob, he cant even navigate a simple menu system.

dont know what handful of bbses he called, but i get 10 or more new users a day, and all the msg nets i have are very active. even the fidonet subs!

i think this guy was on boards that didnt have fidonet setup [but had the msg subs made by default].

he should have asked for help before typing up this TLDR masterpiece and making himself look like a moron.

Bullshit, the moderators do all the trolling themselves.

That is an awesome analogy and fits perfectly.

While I had heard of telnet BBSes, and as much of a huge fan of BBSes I was back in the day, I just can’t see the point in them today. I WANT to see the point, and I am currently “calling” a few on a regular basis, but like the author above I’m still struggling to find a reason to keep doing so, other than for nostalgia.

From a TECHNICAL stand point there’s nothing BBSes have to offer that the Internet doesn’t do better. In my world, BBSes revolved around five things: messages, files, online games, text file collections, and real time chatting. I don’t think it can be argued that any of these things work better on BBSes (again, from a technical perspective) than they do on el webbo.

It has been said that BBSes were better because the users were more technically adept, and at least throughout the 80’s, this was largely the case. Sure there were annoying kids, but there weren’t 10 million of them. The logic is, it took a certain amount of intelligence, knowledge, dedication, and let’s face it, money, to get online back then. So obviously that’s a different demographic than who’s online today. The only argument I see for bringing back BBSes is the same; selectivity through obscurity, or something like that. In other words, MySpace kids are never going to be into telnetting into boards and vomiting HTML everywhere. Then again, ten years ago, I never thought I’d see them here (online) either. So who knows. I think exclusitivity would be more easily done via an invitation only forum than putting together some archiac system that’s pigeon-holing people into 20 year old menu systems.

God bless the guys that are keeping boards online, but I tell ya, most of the ones I’ve seen look a lot like those fake city fronts in old west amusement parks. Yeah, it looks like a BBS, but without any individuality or local flavor, what exactly have you got?

Excellent post.

http://williamgibsonboard.com is an example of a much smaller community. People here have often met one another to hang out in real life. It is a small but very tight community.

Like the above guy said, there are Livejournal groups that are very local centric with kids/people only from a certain area. Despite Livejournal having such a (deserved) bad rep, some of those groups actually have a little bit of the spirit of old BBSs.

The closest thing I’ve seen to what you describe are livejournal groups focused on a specific city or part of a city. Only people who care about that area participate. I’m not a fan of livejournal but those actually are communities and many are thriving.