I Guess They Want The BBS Community To Die…

Last month I decided it would be a nice idea to set up a side project on my BBS in the form of a new echo network: that is, basically, an area on my board that other BBS Sysops could share on their boards and, through the magic of arcane packet transfers, messages would propagate to and from all the boards, allowing multiple BBS instances to participate in the same conversation.

If you know the concept of FidoNet, then you understand what I was going for. It’s the exact same idea, and there are many general and special interest echonets out there. In my case, the network is focused on telephony and classic phone phreaking.

There are a few ways to get boards to intercommunicate, and in my case I felt the easiest for me would be QWK messaging. I was already familiar with it as a Synchronet SYSOP and with only a little trouble successfully set up my echos to be shared over QWK packets with a fellow Sysop.

Things got a little messy when we added in a couple of other boards, ones that weren’t Synchronet. While I don’t think explicitly the board software should matter too much, one can’t rule it out, or the Sysop not knowing what to do to resolve an obscure issue related to what is admittedly an atypical BBS echonet methodology so the other day I decided that I would inquire about how to set my network up to use FTN as well as QWK technologies — the former being the protocol that spawned from FidoNet.

FTN, from my perspective, appears to be a complicated, demanding beast. That’s why I didn’t go with it initially, but when I announced my network initially on Reddit, I was met with a few posts strongly suggesting I use FTN instead. I was never against it, but that would, of course, require me to learn more about it, which I found myself with time and energy to want to do this weekend.

Now, being a Synchronet Sysop, I felt it would be only natural to ask on DOVE-Net in the Synchronet Sysop echo. I’ve not been able to find reasonable documentation on how to actually become a hub — that is, a host — for such a network, only how to join them, and while I could easily extrapolate how the process probably works, I wanted to check my understanding and get verification that I had the right idea, or, if I was wrong or did not know something particular, I could be told that.

So, in Synchronet Sysop’s, I posted the following:

Hey everyone,

Late last month I decided to try my hand at setting up a small echo network, originally going with QWK as the networking methodology to some success but lackluster enthusiasm — it was suggested to me that setting it up as FTN would be a better option, which I didn’t disagree with but I felt it to be a little “too much” for me and my skill set. This opinion stems from little things about my current FTN setups which I’ve not been able to fully understand or, in one case, even get working.

To be honest I find the whole thing quite fiddly, slightly arcane (not in the good way) and on a whole just unpleasant to get working. That being said, I still want to take on the challenge of getting, if even just on a small scale, my little echo network available via FTN as well as QWK.

My question then is, well, how do I go about actually making myself a hub? I feel I understand the basic principles of SBBSecho and, as a person with their board on fsxNet and Micronet, broadly grasp the gist of how FTN operates, but would rather seek guidance than spend my own and another sysop’s time in testing things (not that I can’t just set up a test board myself, but that’s a chore of it’s own)

My understanding would be, broadly this:
I am board A, and a board which has me as their hub will be board B.
I would get the normal FTN information from the board A sysop (web address, passwords for fix / tic, etc) and assign them a node number.
I would set them up in my linked nodes just like any other board, and they would do the same to me, with them setting me as an uplink for a message group: I would, per the wiki, have an area file set up containing the echos I wish to provide to these downlinks.

And…. that’s vaguely my grasp of things. Forgive me for not being explicit with every step, I find writing technical details to be an absolute chore. What I’m really wanting to do is see if my overall idea is sound — understanding that I would do similar steps to subscribing to a network, but in a kind of reverse way… heck, that might be too complex of a way to think about it, but that’s what first comes to my mind.

Am I correct or way off base? I apologize for this being a bit of a read but it is a complicated topic and I want to make sure I’m not mucking things up.

Thanks,

Sure, a bit of a meandering post, verbose as always given my nature, but nothing crazy. Just me being a genuinely curious and cautious hobbyist wanting to do something right.

What I would wake up to the following morning after posting this (it was late, and actually right as my medication was kicking in) was the following from a Sysop who goes by the handle “nelgin.” After quoting my first paragraph, he said the following:

Maybe the issue isn’t whether you’re using QWK or FNT, but it’s whether
sysops want to deal with YADN (Yet Another Dead Network).

In regards to my describing setting up FTN as being complicated:

This is why I’ve never really tried to or wanted to be a hub. Just
seems way too many hoops to jump through just to configure yourself as
a node for a network, let alone a hub.

People were generally clear on their two positions when I had originally proposed the network which is the event I’m initially referring to — that either another net covered some of the same ground (a moot point, other more focused groups can easily exist, even in a limited space such as the BBS scene) and that they felt more traction could be gained by using FTN instead of QWK. They were quite clear on these two points; only one person, who was a “very interested” party was concerned with it being a dead network.

Is not every network a “dead” network until it gets going? Sure, you can have a group of people who decide to start something as an offshoot, but it’s just as common to have things spawn out of nowhere and exist for their own sake. Hell, I started it as a “can I do this” kind of project, and my goal was to learn more about the nature of BBS technology by successfully setting up this network over FTN on at least one board that happens to be a good candidate for such, as for whatever reason the echo isn’t behaving correctly using QWK. Ideally I’d at least want to see if switching the transfer method to FTN solves this issue. This is a pretty basic debugging and testing scenario, one I simply wanted a little guidance on my side of. No, instead one is given abject negativity.

I responded:

Your defeatist attitude and opinions are noted and filed appropriately in the garbage.

It absolutely amazes me how people in this scene can have an attitude like that about even just the experiment of creating such and the enjoyment which can come from seeing it work. Yet, here it is, on full display, along with the classic failure of reading comprehension combined with a presumption of what my goals are with the project — acting like I think it’s going to be the next FidoNet or something, and not just a little thing I want to try making for myself and a few friends to take advantage of, as well as something to have fun with in the creation of.

But no, your attitude is don’t try. Yep, real constructive idea there.

Right, here’s where people who actually want to help and like the idea of creating new things and helping the community grow in any capacity comes in and actually gasp actually helps!

Snarky? Sure. A waste of time? Yeah, but as Dave Farina put it in his video “Response to Globebusters – The Earth Still Isn’t Flat” I had to respond purely as a point of honor, as his reply truly encapsulated the attitude of “just don’t try” which makes absolutely no sense to me here. So, I shouldn’t try to take advantage of this technology which is built into Synchronet for this very purpose to link a few friendly BBSes together because, why? Because you personally are tired of them dying?

Well nelgin, it’s not my fault you decided to connect your BBS to every network out there and are ticked that over half of them are dead. You chose to go through that effort on your own. I never asked nor implied at all that I would want you to carry my network. As with most anything I create, it’s there for those who simply might enjoy it and if they don’t, that’s fine.

Why do I say that about nelgin’s BBS? Because he runs End of the Line, a board that’s famous for being connected to damn near every network. That’s it. That’s the main reason people use it — it’s on everything, so it’s a “one stop shop” for most of the other nets, which is cool: more power to him and his board.

The thing is, the attitude presented to me is clear as day coming from personal frustration which isn’t my problem. To have an attitude of “don’t bother” in this community is wild. Yeah, there are more boards than users, and more sysops than boards, but every time a new board or a new net starts it’s a chance for something magic to happen — for that board or net to stick and something to grow from it, helping the BBS community thrive and be a better place than it was.

That’s why this attitude just makes no damn sense to me — it’s truly like they want the community to die. By the logic present, one shouldn’t set up other boards because no one will call in. Forget that each board can have its own style, subject, and may attract different or unique people. Nope, we don’t need any more BBSes. Same with networks, too, not that they can’t become unique spots of interaction, we all just have to use the same ones that already exist, no room for any more. Hey, how about we all stop running BBSes all together since that there world wide web exists and we can do all this on Facebook and Twitter and Whatsapp and whatever else comes down the pipe next week.

Oh, wait, we do this because we enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun, and instead, you get shit like this. Abject negativity that, for some reason, seems celebrated in most every other community I join… and yet I’m always “too negative” to some people. Hah. What a lark.

Of course, my original above reply was met with the traditional reply of the idiots:

TL;DR blah blah blah.

Yep. A quality reply of nothingness from someone who clearly has issues. If he hates this scene as much as he clearly does why doesn’t he just leave? Let someone else start up a board to connect to all the other networks and let them be happy about the idea of adding another one… which I say, but again, I don’t give a fuck if no one beyond the few boards that have my network on them add it — it’s supposed to be a close knit thing that’s open to more people who may be interested. That’s kind of the whole point of this thing.

All I did was ask for advice on getting it set up in a different way that I find is poorly documented. Instead, well, you see what one gets.

To use the old adage once again, I’m not mad… just disappointed.You would think asking for assistance wouldn’t be met with this.

No one ever did provide any assistance, either. Really paints a more than sour picture of the already pretty fucked up group that is DOVE-Net, and the core Synchronet userbase in general.