Re: WWIV how I miss thee
  By: Thom Miller to Sean Dennis on Thu Apr 08 2010 11:36 am

 > After a 14 year absence from the BBS scene, I stumbled across the world of
 > Telnet BBSing when I got my old Amiga 2000 on-line and decided that checking
 > out BBSes would make the nolstalgic trip even more fun.  After looking aroun
 > for about a month, though, I'm afraid I'm inclined to agree with you, Sean.
 > There do seem to be A LOT of synchonet boards around, and a lot of them look
 > and behave exactly the same way.

I regularly call a Synchronet board and have been for several years.  I don't
have too many qualms about the stock configuration, though it discourages me
from taking the effort, as little as it requires, to look at others since
it's extremely likely they're configured in pretty much the same way.  I
can't say as I was terribly impressed with teh one or two customized boards
I've tried.  Lightbars and scrolling text do not lend themselves well to
Telnet.  They were cool on a 14.4 but more of a deterrent now.

 > That's part of the reason why I started fooling around with dosemu and T.A.G
 > ove the last week or so.  I thought it would be cool to put up a board that
 > looksa little difference from the other systems, but see how much
 > 'modernization' I could bring into it.  Right now I've got the BBS software 
 > and running and am working on some code to pull system information, messages
 > etc. out of the old pascal data structures, convert them to XML, and bring t
 > nto a Drupal website.  This is, to a degree, replicating stuff that Synchron
 > can already do (natively, even), but that's not really the point, is it?

That actually sounds like a fun project.  I could see myself doing something
similar "just because," but sadly I can't muster the enthusiasm
to try.  You
should follow up with the echo when you've got it working.  For my part, I
wouldn't mind calling a T.A.G. board again just for grins and giggles.

 > At some point, I'm sure, I'm going to want to start working on getting the B
 > onto Dovenet, fidonet, or whatever...  It's probably going to be a pain, but
 > that's really more of an incentive to see if I can get it to work, rather th
 > a deterrent.

I thought T.A.G supported at least 2-3 different messagebase formats, one of
them being JAM, though I'll admit I haven't looked at it in a LONG time.  I
know FrontDoor works with it.  Can't vouch for QWK networks though.

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