The answer, of course, was the sysop. This, again, led to the potential for abuse of power, since if the sysop didn’t like you or didn’t think your messages were clever or contributing enough, s/he could simply lock you out with the justification that you were trying to fill the message boards with nonsense to get around the PCR.

For my own part, on boards that had a PCR, I usually tried to make a good-faith effort to put up messages that weren’t meaningless drivel, but didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of content to them either. These usually took the form of a simple invitation-for-discussion question, like “So what does everyone think of (some game or movie that recently came out)” or something like that. I used local political issues a couple of times, like “Has anyone noticed any effects from the restructuring of the city council?” The latter type of question is of course one of the things that BBSes were great for, because you had the assurance that most callers were local and would know exactly what you were talking about, as opposed to the Internet where a guy in Idaho might read the message despite probably lacking the faintest clue about the city council of a town somewhere in Nebraska. Such posts are really quick and simple to make as ways of increasing your PCR, but they do tend to foster decent discussion on the message areas (which is what the PCR was designed to encourage).

I find it a bit funny that you describe file upload/download ratios in terms of quantity of files. The vast majority of BBSes that I saw with file ratios based those ratios on the SIZES of the files rather than the quantity, meaning you could upload a single huge file and get credit for lots of smaller files. A system like this worked out well for me, because I’m kind of a retrogamer and most of the games that I like to play are older and smaller, so I could acquire a copy of a single relatively new and huge game, upload it, and then be able to download several of the smaller games I wanted.

FTP sites today still routinely have ratios. Some P2P programs also have a tit-for-tat system in which people who you’re uploading a file to will automatically give you a higher priority in their waiting queue if you’re waiting to download a file from them.

The other (and slightly more positive) purpose ratios served was to keep BBSes alive. The vast majority of BBS content was provided by end users. Sure, sysops tweaked menus and colors to make each BBS (at least seem) unique, but at the end of the day, it was messages (provided by users) and files (largely provided by users) that could make or break a board. Without posts and files, boards grew stale and died. Ratios were a way to ensure delivery of new content.

You are correct in saying that ratios didn’t always solve the problem. I had a fairly lax file ratio on my old BBS — 10:1, if I remember correctly, meaning users could download 10 files for every 1 they uploaded. Most of my users never even noticed the ratio, in fact. Those who uploaded things every now and then never ran out of “credits.” The users that the ratios were designed to regulate were the ones who worked the hardest to get around them. Those were the people who would upload a hundred MOD files (tiny music files) and then spend hours downloading the latest warez. Spirit of the problem violation, yo. And the worst idea I ever had was implementing a post:file ratio, requiring users to post 1 message for every 10 files downloaded … talk about increasing your noise to signal ratio, sheesh.

BBSes were more personal than the Internet. When someone hotlinks to a picture on my website or scans my server for downloadable files, I don’t take it personal — they’re just somebody (or a script) searching a random IP (mine) for “stuff.” On BBSes, things were different. The people abusing my system were often friends of friends, or people I had met at parties. It’s difficult to tell someone to their face to quit acting like a greedy jerk; it’s much simpler to let software-limited rules to (at least try to) do that for you.

When I throw a party, I can count on my friends to bring food, burgers, beer, etc. I can also count on someone showing up, not bringing a thing, and consuming way more than his or her share. These are the people ratios were created for. When everybody shares, everybody wins.