Hi All!
Saturday December 28 1996, Dennis Jenkins babbled to Dave Halliday:
 -> If we wait too long there may be NO bbses carrying fidonet.
Sorry guys and girls, but my outlook on the Internet/BBS issue has a bit more 
positive outlook than what I've seen.  I watch the listings in the Regional 
Sysop echo, and see the amount BBSs in the list falling off.  Locally, and 
I'm sure in other cities/areas as well, there are a some who start up a BBS 
and let it run for a short while then take it down.  Then you have the 
diehard sysops who through hell or high water aren't going to take their 
boards down.  I think the later is more common.  These guys who throw a board 
up and don't have the dedication as some of the oldies are what's  shrinking 
the number of national Fido nodes.  Even if it got down to 20,000 in the US 
(It's far from that now) it would be a heck of a long time before this 
happened.  The Internet doesn't have a specific inpact on Fidonet, it's the 
BBS world in general that's being hit.  I don't believe the average sysop is 
going to disconnect from Fido then leave his board up.  AAMOF, there are many 
BBSs that carry the usegroups and Fido echos.  Not to mention, the 
availabilty of software to allow this is increasing.
IMHO some of the new of the Internet will drop off long before we aren't able 
to get Fido echos.  You won't have bandwidth problems with a BBS.  If you 
can't log onto one BBS and get your echo, there are others.  If you can't get 
on your ISP because the server is down, or because Trumpet is giving you 
errors, or because you have busy signals, most people don't have more than 
one ISP account to get on.  Convinience is a factor.
As far as a usegroup moderator goes, it's harder than anyone can imagine 
keeping those idiots who crosspost and spam into every newsgroup available 
from doing this.  When you get into a group to read, and the first 50 
messages have a subject line about Free Pornography or Make $1,000,000 FAST, 
then it gets annoying fast.  A moderator can do very little about this unless 
it's illegal.
I just wouldn't worry too much about it right now.
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       Greg Cobb  -   gcobb@memphisonline.com
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