I used to use Bulletin Board Systems though now with the graphical internet the scene is pretty dead...

It's *technically* possible to reverse engineer the entire server of an extremely complex game (always-online single player games), but in practice its never going to happen.

This. Didn't even get on the web until 2004 and even I'm spending more time on IRC, Usenet and a few BBSs.

What's amazing is how often the people on these aren't old. I go on a BBS where there's a few in their teens, and about 20 or so in their mid 20s like me. And this is a small BBS.

The thing is that most BBSs are actually undocumented and spread by word of mouth.

Sup Forums is pretty bloated senpai.

what BBS do you go on?

There's lots of reasons to BBS beside nostalgia. A lot of microcomputer hobbyists spend a lot of time on the text-web like BBSs and Gopher.

I'd totally be up to using something like BBS. Too young to have ever used it, but I've been curious about how they used to be like and how they worked

I go on loads. Even got bored one day when the web was down and made myself a simple bash menu so I could navigate to them quickly.

Sort of like:
(A)pple (P)ear
(B)anana (O)range

I first got in to BBSing when our internet got really shitty for about a month due to them rebuilding the local exchange.

I'm talking 20KBs at the fastest, but it could end up being literally 2KBs if others were on.

>I go on loads.
but which ones are any good? i've only been able to find a couple.

Traditionally they worked by sending character signals as sound down the phone like, so you were essentially "speaking" computer to computer. You'd dial directly as if it was a telephone call.

It worked exactly like dial up internet, but instead of dialing into a headend at your ISP that accessed the web for you, all you could access was the server at the number.

And then you get FidoNet which is perhaps the greatest hobbyist creation ever.

This is where BBS is better than the web, in my opinion: it's a creation of people, not governments.

I mean, the first BBS was made by two guys on a snowy day. That's wonderful to me.

IIRC FidoNet was then a way that a BBS server could send and receive messages from other BBS servers. So you could dial into one and then access others.

You sent messages to others through a node list.

Went something like 1:24:120

Went something like (country):(region):(node)

there.

It makes me sort of sad we might not have anything remotely like this anymore

BBS after 2005 has not anything to do with technology but rather a sign of your failure.

There is a future for BBS, and it's already happened nearly 15 years ago. It's called phpBB or any forum software. It even has BB in the name to show that it was the natural evolution to something else.

however, you'll claim it's shit because it looks good and isn't centered around banning 99% of users. you'll also notice that this has less to do with the software and more to do with your shitty stinge "adult" life wherein you think you are clever for being alone on purpose. You could theme phpbb or whatever and make it look all shitty but nothing is going to save you from other people, by which I mean yourself.

the other problem we're going to have is you'll also say "things were more close knit back then" or some other load of nothing equivalent cop-out - this is in fact you not having grown up into yourself as you are now yet, back during a time when you could actually talk to people of any kind.

don't spend too much time salivating over any links posted in this thread to private bbs circlejerks - you won't know their two decades of butt diddling inside circlejerk in-jokes and will be banned within the day. It's all been played out, it is over, and you aren't invited. Guess who is on the other side, banning you? even shittier losers.

>a lot of hobbyists piss away their worthless time

BBSes are run by single persons and like all "creations" like this they follow the same pattern:
>starts to attract visitors
>attracts people who have differing opinions
>drama drama and more drama
>One day, the piece of shit owner finally realizes there is indeed nothing keeping him from hitting BAN.
>starts to ban everyone over big differences in opinion by labeling them trolls
>as time goes on starts to ban even more people if they differ even slightly
>starts to ban people if they don't understand the shitty 15 year old in-jokes, even if they ask about it and try to "learn" their shit "culture"
we have now created a circlejerk. what happens next?
>starts to ban people on sight by "completing" their opinion for them. For example, "I bet they were just one of those people who would disagree with me"
don't believe me, any time you post anything against bbs you get called a normie and a kid. if they owned the channel it would be instant ban for me.
>20 years pass of 1-3 posts PER YEAR.
>after this time it's just "remember when I made this post, well my kid didn't kill himself back then" or other shitty nothing "history" posts
this is what bbses were. really, you didn't miss out on anything. the "ye olde good 'ol days wild west" of the web were mostly populated by angry losers who didn't want to admit they made their own situation. Now with the internet being mainstream, they don't have their gay little power anymore, and are vocal and whiny as fuck about it.

Lol, you have quite shitty experience with BBSes, usually they where run by more than one person also.
Looks like your whole experience with them is some neo-luddite hipster fag running on on hes loonix shitbox two years ago.

>a lot of hobbyists piss away their worthless time
I hate the average retro shit like any other justin wannabe, but aren't hobbies about wasting away time?

You sound very entitled. You want someone to run a BBS for your pleasure and not allow in anyone you don't agree with?
Are you a millenial?

Kek

and like with everything else, just leave when things start to suck and go somewhere else, optionally taking the non-retarded people with you. nothing lasts forever.

>Chans work great
I wouldn't expect any non-retarded comments from someone who uses stupid buzzwords like "bloated", but I was still pretty surprised that someone would say imageboards work great.

The only ones that don't use a stupid frame are Sup Forums and (2^3)chan, and both of those are loaded with pornsite-tier ads.

Obviously if I go to a honda site and literally just post "HONDA A SHIT!!!!!!!! SUBARU FTW!!!!!! FUK U!!!!!", I expect to be banned. You could go to a honda site and even if you own one, you ask why so many people like these 80s and 90s hatches when they have no steering wheel lock and are absurdly easy to steal and then be banned because that's what the site owner has. In the same way, I couldn't casually and gently ask why a bbs owner insists on 40-50 year old software when there are free web forums available because they don't want to admit that they don't want traffic in the first place because they are shut-ins even on the internet.

I'm not dictating that you can't make a circlejerk - you can go and waste away in the corner if you want. Problem we're having here is when you spend all this time pretending that said corner is some "lost internet history thing" and try to invite people to it only to ban them within days. this is not only a morbid cartoon joke but you waste everyone's time. Just yesterday we had some other guy who had fallen for this meme and was trying to find BBSes to join when we know very well nobody is going to let him in.

irc is exactly the same, along with any website that lets you make a channel/group and be the only authority on it. see: tumblr and obscure reddit subforums. they have seen their last post 6 years ago and it's generally "fuck everyone here who uses something even slightly different". Now imagine that except left to sit and bake outside for 3-4 times as long, and you have a BBS. You're dealing with EXPONENTIAL autism.

You brought up a great point:
>optionally taking the non-retarded people with you

What do you think happens again? "We know what went wrong, fuck the last admin, this time we'll do it *RIGHT*!"

But because it's the same model, where one person is the only admin, it will simply be a different facet of the same thing. It will explode into banning again and then there will be a NEW sub group of people who will do it *RIGHT*. It will take a different form, especially when you can prove that one extreme post was a "troll" and the rest that are even slightly like it "must be the same guy". You don't have to listen to the other side because it will be silenced.

The other problem with this is when you take search engine rankings into account, although it only applies to websites. For example you are automatically given a bonus if your site is older, but if it IS older, it has a higher chance of being a butthurt ban nothing land.

This is why web consolidation was the best thing to happen to the internet. Yes, you can still get banned on big networks, I know it happens to celebrities, but it's fantastically much harder to be banned over trivial nothings that entire IRC ban explosion trees happened over. You can only really be banned for death threats, and not saying "I guess I don't particularly like subaru"

>[all that shit]
of course it does. it's a cycle. enjoy things for a couple (several?) years and go somewhere else. the whole ride is part of the fun.

>This is why web consolidation was the best thing to happen to the internet...
and the most boring thing. i guess the reason cyberpunk media never predicted THIS future is because nobody would care to consume it