I Don't Think A BBS Will Happen 2023-05-02

So, a half dozen years ago I changed the layout of snork.ca to this ugly BBS style. The idea was that I missed the interaction style that BSSs provided, and wished that kind of interaction could have continued on in some more appropriate modern way. Since I dumped my BBS in the early 2000's I have always had some burning desire in the back of my mind to setup Maximus CBCS again. That's why I made another post only three years ago saying pretty much the same thing. Now, snork.ca still looks a bit like a BBS but obviously there are no hotkeys, no message areas, and no door games. My more recent post brings up the topic of encryption, which I would consider an essential part of a service that requires users to identify themselves. The bad news is that BBSing is mostly forgotten and nobody is interested in developing a BBS application [or FOSSIL] that makes a BBS service available via encrypted session, let alone also developing a client that can connect to it. Lastly, the idea of users being willing to setup something like Stunnel to encapsulate a telnet session in TLS is pretty ridiculous.

The last photo of Merrygold.

Today I did a little farting around with Max and Gamesrv, but it wasn't going well. I think gamesrv versions can be vastly different from each other and it is intended mostly to be for running a single door style application rather than a full BBS. I got frustrated and went looking at Synchronet, but was disappointed to see that [on Windows] it requires VS runtime libs (definitely NOT in the spirit of BBSing) and on *ix it requires a crappy list of dependencies followed by a somewhat touchy build process. If I can push past the frustration later I may have another stab at it, but for now I am just sad about the whole thing. :-(