Over the past half year I’ve had, shall we say, mixed feelings about operating a Bulletin Board System. It was about 4 years ago I decided to take a random Raspberry Pi and make it into a BBS test system. The Pi died after a short while, so I switched to using, of all things, a surplus Dell rackmount server that I just happen to own and, for the better part of that 4 years, it ran the BBS well.
It did however get tired hearing it run constantly, and having it pump out heat as it did. It was also stuck on an older version of Windows Server (I could have upgraded but never bothered) which was fine until the software I chose to run my BBS, Synchronet, would not update and run beyond 3.18 on that particular system.
Sure, I could have switched it to Linux or BSD. Hell, I should have done that — I’m far more skilled with such than I was back in 2020 when I started Final Zone, or back in late 2019 when I first got the server. Given it had a valid Windows License available, and I’m the oddball who actually likes Windows it made sense to want to use it. I liked the way SBBS behaved on Windows and felt it was the best option for me at the time.
Anyway, move on to the past few half year and I have had grown tired of running a board. I actually retired the board for a little while (like, a week or two) but powered the server back up because I missed the thing.
I made an attempt to migrate the board over to a Linux VPS, but it didn’t migrate properly any time I tried. I’m certain I was doing something wrong, but with my work schedule being what it is I grew tired of devoting an hour or two a day to just testing and trying to fix things. Yeah, had I tried more I could have got it, I’m sure, but I’m also a lazy man sometimes.
So, I decided to give Mystic a go. There were a few reasons for this, but it suffices to say I kind of wanted a reset to Final Zone anyway and everything going on was basically a good excuse to do such. This was February or so of this year.
Move ahead to April, and I realized I’m just not totally enjoying Mystic either. I mean, I like it. I liked SBBS a bit more, but I realized my goals in running a BBS were just not what Mystic could facilitate. I needed a built in web interface (like SBBS provided but Mystic lacked) but also wanted something that was, in a sense, local by design — I had grown tired of FTN based networks and the Gen-X neo-Boomer bigoted right wing ramblings that filled them. Honestly the discussion on a whole wasn’t that good for the most part — a few stand out groups and people, certainly, but sadly they were the minority.
I had been trying out Citadel — software that at its core is ostensibly a Bulletin Board System, but one which happens to have a pretty fleshed out, albeit dated, web interface that works well within the specification I wanted. No door games, no FTN networks, no QWK networks, nothing. Just a local board for people to chat and have fun. All I wanted. It ain’t perfect, but I did enjoy my testing of it a few months back and, after putting it into production on a fresh VPS and doing the necessary hacks to config it properly, things were off to a good start.
Citadel works in a floor / room kind of methodology — Floors contain Rooms, and rooms are where messages are posted. It’s not too different from the way echo areas are sorted on most BBS software, really just a naming convention change. The way it manages those areas, as well, is better in my opinion — I’ve seen quite the simple change to an echo in other software break the message areas as they were. These being as simple as name changes or ID tag changes which should be handled more gracefully, in my opinion.
That’s not to bash on other software, no — remember, I genuinely like Synchronet and miss using it, but I felt this was a better option moving forward. I can really control the message areas and have fun with this again.
Trick now, of course, is to advertise, and try to rebuild the modest community I did have. I don’t run the board explicitly for myself — I run it for others to use and enjoy, which makes me happy. While the idea of a networked BBS is awesome in principle, in practice, for me, it just becomes as dull and vapid a thing to log in to as Twitter or Facebook, or any other social media.
My feelings about running a board simply changed. Only slightly, but slightly enough to make me feel that after 4 years, it’s time for a major change and, after over a month of testing, I’ve been pretty comfortable with this change.
That being said, if you want to join in, the domain is the same: final-zone.net
Web, Telnet, and Citadel on port 504.
Enjoy.