pouët.net

hey.

I'm still running a BBS, nowadays on telnet (haciend.com), that has a few doorgames (Legend of the red dragon, tw2002, global war) and some message networks, mainly on topics outside of the demoscene.

I'd love to get some more active users there, mainly people just stop by for once and then never telnet back.

what'd be the thing that would make a user come back in the modern days? a lot of the files are available somewhere elsewhere and the terminal programs usually have shit ansi emulation.

I'm one of those nasty users that logged in once, and never again. :)

How about you add a ascii-based voting system for the releases of the previous month in there? Now that demoklubi seems to not be happening anymore, we need an alternative to the klubi award.

(It could even include a shitty-quality autoconverted ascii stream of the demos in question.)

hard to say

exclusive and periodic new content maybe?

i tried a few telnet BBSs for the curiosity of it, dont recall if i ever did an account at hacienda or not.

it was cute, but once you explore the contents it feels like it's not gonna have any new content anytime soon. and you can contact people faster and more reliably through other means so the messaging system is kind of not really a driving force anymore.

and for me that's what killed the interest of dialing back.

so i think they would need to have like weekly updates of things worth checking out that i can't get anywhere else to make me want to redial on a semi-regular basis. otherwise it's just waste of time to login to check that nothing is new.

maybe a notifications system (send mail when something new is up) would be useful to drive people to go back and check what's new and what other people have been saying about it?

just thinking out loud.

Well, resembling old bbs systems that have no real use or benefit compared to websites and stuff are usually just visited for nostalgias sake and not because people care for the community on the board itself which would make them return (there may be exceptions but id expect them to be very limited). And as much as I was into L.O.R.D. and GW back in the days its fascination has kind of faded... ;p

So urs has a point, the board needs to offer something special to make people return.
Giving the ANSInes of BBSes that would probably be a good place to start, like doing dedicated online compos with convenient display of the works without the need of an external viewer, a voting system for it (similar to what urs suggested), maybe even some sort of (multiuser?) online ansi editor or something entirely different I cant think of right now.

tl;dr: most people wont stick around for nostalgias sake, they go "aaaaw those were the days" for a couple of minutes and thats about it.

a return to 1200 baud modems might get me to visit BBS's again

0-dayz warez!

Add a web frontend... look & feel like 1991, comfort from today

Or try cooperating with TMDC :)

All the latest scene releases :)

Free bitcoins ;)

Loss of net neutrality?

nothing?

Tits! Perky blocky tits!
And a dragon! A perky blocky dragon!

about ansi capabilities of terminals: it would be nice to see an overview which ones are really usable and on which OS. If the outcome is rather sad a proper web-implementation like T$ said would probably be the way to go.

Fullscreen chat, the kind of where you instantly see the others typing each character, not the line-wise type.
Also MUDs or similar, eg. Hack & Slash
And FidoNet, Usenet et al.

a downloadable cindy15.gif

1) Someone to code new commercial Amiga software
2) Someone to crack them
3) Some competition to spread them

Or...

1) If majority of demoscene productions would be released properly in BBS friendly way again (archived with correctly written file_id.diz files with correct naming), maybe some friendly trading would be fun again. I'm just too fed up to repack and tidy everything up nowadays when "releases" don't respect any rules anymore...

true that, scene's gotta get some manners again!

some nice ideas in this thread. and yea..

FREE BITCOINS

hey .. i wasn't expecting any comments. thanks :)

and yes, the content is the thing. i need to figure out something exotic and exiting. something that is tempting to read or see via 80x25 telnet terminal.

good points on the usability (ansiness etc) as well. there are dedicated telnet programs and the terminals on linux & osx can be configured so that it doesnt look completely shit. but it usually requires something extra from the user and it can be too much. there's a flash / javascript based telnet terminal that works every now and then.

there's a lot of things going on for nostalgia's sake so i wouldn't judge that. its the nostalgia why i have the bbs still up as well.

like jPV said, the releases are nowadays (and also were back in the days) released without nfo files or file_id.diz descriptions. that's a bit of a bummer. i could always draw file_id.diz things for people (on a large scale as well) but it wouldn't solve the problem - people these days dont remember that stuff anymore, or might've not even been in the bbs scene when that was a thing.

thanks a lot for the comments :) and bitcoin can go eat dick.

everything "out of the ordinary" would probably require some coding on the bbs system side of things tho

Think about what a modern scene bbs could be like. No telnet, web based. Live chat, message boards, integrated shadertoy and js demos. Could be properly kick ass!

Something like that i'd probably use a lot. Anything telnet based, I might take a look around just once and never come back ;)

While I haven't looked at my BBS in years, I've been of the opinion that those who are suitably interested and dedicated to call a BBS are sysops. And they're basically just in it to run their own BBS again and remember the great fun they used to have.

I certainly miss Tradewars and a reason to use ANSI graphics, though.

Still, like psonice suggests, I imagine a BBS-like creation would have more of a chance than an actual BBS.

A modem pool for my us robotics 28800 modem would be cool.

any bbs-ish web interface needs an option to set the modem speed from 1200 to 28.8k bps :D

i might get crucified for this but BBS was a great thing since it was cutting edge and the best we had back then... nostalgia turned it into a beautiful thing but they were used out of sheer necessity and there is absolutely no point in reviving them now when your device in your pocket can easily overwhelm you with practically 50000x more information.

i could see some people jumping on it and "yay.. bbs!" and after a few minutes "now what?..." i don't know... back then it had content we had nowhere else. but now, using a bbs for the sake of it being bbs just seems pointless to me.