From: "Frank Haber" 

So was this YARN a screen-scraper?  Did it do the usual USENET
"threading" or something more sophisticated.

I'm thinking of a couple of UNIX-based BBSes I remember.  The convention
was to use the first line of the message as a title, and archive
everything.  You had up/down, side-creep and skip-to-next-subthread in the
client program, which could work from a local database, refreshing and
adding in real-time, if you wanted.

Messages weren't addressed ; there was fulltext search with inverted index,
and some sort of KwiC facility as well.  Whereas CIS, for DEC-10 capacity
reasons, simply lopped off ("aged out") subthreads by raw message
age, the above BBSes simply kept going.  I never noticed any slowdown at
the 1G messagebase point (they had to stop somewhere, because of filesystem
limitations - these were pre-SystemV).

I developed quite an affection for these boards (Magpie was one).  The
"infinite memory" of the archived, indented message base was like
an oral history of your friends and of your fights.  I think it had an
organic life quite beyond the simple text of the stored messages.  But I
gush.  Times are different now.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5