Hello John!
Maybe I was dreaming, but didn't you say this on Friday March 07 1997
 JP> Helen Peagram wrote it for All to answer..
 HP>> To all my friends on this echo,
[snip]
 HP>> you and swapping recipes.  I will look for another avenue, but can't
 HP>> promise anything at this time.
 JP> Helen, I will miss your input.
You'll be glad to hear that Helen has managed to use a route that a number of 
others have found, so it seems as if her days aren't numbered finally.
 JP> Unfortunately it appears that the days of the BBS are numbered.
I truly hope not. I intend to continue to use them for a number of years yet.
I can't begin to enumerate the reasons why. I know that a number of BBS which 
carried "interesting" gfx closed in some disarray after some threats (and 
worse) of prosecution. This has certainly damaged the network, but I have 
noticed that on the whole, things are improved of late.
  I, too, am very sad that Intercook is not more used, and try to do my bit 
to post recipes from time to time. Certainly the volume of traffic here is 
way down on what it was when I first started taking it. It seemed to happen 
while I was away about 15 months ago, and never seemed to pick up since. Of 
course what happens is something of a vicious circle. An echo becomes used 
less, so people read it less, which leads to them writing less. Then a 
regular user may go away for a while, and his Sysop decides to remove it from 
his Board, for lack of access. That means no new users know it exists, and so 
on. Finally, it can get dropped from a national feed, and that's the whole 
country cut off. I can understand that the guy who has to pull in God knows 
how many megs a day long distance, may want to keep his feed to those echos 
which have some activity in the country he's feeding. I have that trouble in 
France to some extent, where the readership of an English speaking echo is 
strictly limited. Fortunately I still can get this area for the moment.
 JP> Hope to see you on the web.
If you use the web, there are ways to get this echo, even if your BBS drops 
it. I don't know too much about it, but I expect that Dale Shipp will tell 
you.
All the Best
Ian
--- GoldED 2.50+
---------------