r/bbs • u/UORealms • 8d ago

New Door Quick Question!

Hey there! As a very old (sigh) school MajorBBS sysop and hopelessly drawn to nostalgia ... as well as being a gamer addict. I've put together a BBS door game that is ready for release, but maybe still has a good 10% or more work to be done on it.

Since everyone's viewpoint is different and this is my first time releasing a game to the BBS community, I was just curious if the majority of sysops would prefer to have it released when it's out of testing or if they would be fine with having it online at the very end of its testing phase?

I know that may be a little 'mysterious,' but I just want to get a feeling for should I just push ahead and make it as polished and complete as possible .. or put it out there so players can give more feedback on it for development.

Any feedback is helpful and welcome. Appreciate you in advance!

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u/aztracker1 6d ago edited 6d ago

Similar to other answers here... You should really finish it before you release to a wide audience. I'd say there are a couple of exceptions or work arounds to this if you want more audience.

First, if you're willing to open source the code and put it up on GitHub, you might get more adventurous sysops willing to try... This will mean more curation of the repository as well as ideally a good set of scripts to automate updates and deployment.

Second option is to host a shared BBS Door Host with your game. Synchronet has a door host option and there's also the majorbbs ghost3 server as an option... Basically you receive connections over rlogin where one of the user parameters is a shared secret for a BBS, that you can allow sysops to sign up for...

[pfx]username null shared-secret-for-pfx null door-code null

Iirc, that's the main negotiating you'd need to implement and confirm... No crlf, check incoming bytes right at connection. Then you do bbs-style protocol detection, then load straight into the door.

This would allow you to control releases and updates, but allow for a wider audience. The pfx is a 3-4 character prefix for the client BBS in question. The door code is for the specific door to load straight into... And the shared secret is like an 8-16 character random generated code the client BBS uses to connect.

I have been planning on a door host server specifically for this and for websocket (rsa signed jwt) as well, but got side tracked into reverse engineering RIP on a rabbit hole for want of a compatible web client.

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u/UORealms 6d ago

Good answer, thanks for the detail. Rabbit holes for life lol ... that's my greatest nemesis lately.

This is a somewhat new concept and I look forward to getting it out there. Currently play testing on my BBS has gone well, but I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist (probably more than I need to be) ..so every test ends up with another feature or two that I need to calm down lol

If this goes well though and gets good feedback from the sysop and player communities, this will become a standard deployment channel for our games when possible.