Hello, Eric.

Monday January 10 2011 at 10:34, you wrote to me:

 EO> I never did go to any BBS get-togethers, but I did like the fact that
 EO> BBSs had mainly a local userbase.

My BBS mainly has people I've known over the years through BBSing.  I have
a lot of callers that call once, see that I mean what I say about manual
account verification, then move on.  In fact, I need to set up the Grim
Reaper again to keep my system's userbase cleaned up.  I have several
people with the "permanent" flag toggled on their accounts; some
are people who use my BBS as a backup for their QWK packets and others are
just fellow sysops and friends who I like to make sure they always have
access.  A few are Micronet nodes and hubs; I always make sure they have
access to the network on my system.

 EO> That's cool..  That's something I don't offer on my BBS, besides some
 EO> other BBSs I allow telnetting out to.

Those features don't used much but I set them up just because I could.
Occasionally, I'll be at the library or something and need to grab a file,
so I can do "safe" FTP via my BBS and its fTelnet connection.

 EO> When I started using Synchronet for my BBS, it had some inter-BBS
 EO> chat features that I thought were really cool.  That's something you
 EO> didn't see back when BBSs were more popular.

Yes, exactly, except in MajorBBS/Worldgroup and not many people wanted to
pay the dollars and time, as well as equipment, to run one of those.  I
believe I'm just using Maximus's built-in "line chat", but I do
have a registered copy of SyncChat which works just like MajorBBS's
multi-line chat.

 EO> I think FTP helps a bit with FidoNet-style networks, since it allows
 EO> sysops to exchange data without having to worry about long-distance
 EO> phone calls (which some sysops had to deal with with POTS).

The majority of connections my system has is BinkD (BinkP).  I find BinkP
kinda annoying because if one system isn't answering, it can hold up the
mail processing.  With FTP, it's asynchronous and it works fine for me. 
Heck, I have a node out of Australia who pulls mail via email and the
system works great.

 EO> That's true.  I always enjoyed getting to know my users.

I do too.  I wasn't able to do as many as I could have this time around but
I like to send Christmas cards to users that I know or have chatted with
often.

Some of my closest and dearest friends - these are people I've known for
nearly twenty years now and have never met in person yet :) - I've met
through the BBSing community.  It seems almost all of the people I didn't
get along with in the BBSing have disappeared with the sands of time (I
gather to go harass better victims).  The people I'm still friends with
know me too well by now and can deal with my curmudgeonly, grumpy and moody
ways. :P

Later,
Sean

... So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies. - John Mason Brown

--- GoldED/2 3.0.1