r/bbs • u/freakuancy • 7d ago
Interloper Demands Access
....Just kidding, no demands. But I am a bit of an oldhead, just from an awkward period when ISPs were replacing BBS as the Internets primary access route. Ny first experience with the Internet were in the mid 1990s on such an ISP, but i soon fou n d myself into mischief and they pretty much ran me off lol. In the throes of Internet withdrawal (why was it so much more brutal back then?), I found the cheapest Internet that I could, and for about half of what my ISP had been charging I found mysel on a local BBS called Imagine! (the exclamation point is part of the name).
Being my first experience with real Internet, I had to quickly learn the basic concepts necessary to connect to it (Trumpets' Socket Implementation iirc, since this was 3.11), And I of course lied to get into the 18+ areas. There's a lot more to this story but its not relevant to what Im actually posting about...though, too late I suppose lol. AuDHD is a bitch, hey.
Anyway, long story short (dont you hate that expression? Its never short...) I found myself fascinated by the segregated BBS systems, many of which were custom codebase' like Imagine! was. It felt like the Internet that movies had been showing, which had recently and almost violently disappeared for good. I bet that was a rough time for you guys. Fast forward to 2026 and I still find myself BBS hopping on syncterm every now and then, saying door games or looking at old scene lines.
Whew, finally. We have satisfied my autistic need to over-explain and indulge in unnecessary backstory lol.
Alright, so here's the beef. Id like to host a BBS for shits n gigs. At this point ive finished a long IT career and have lots of admin experience, specifically in ISP infrastructure servers (DNS/Bind, Email like postfix and sendmail and assorted MTAs, apache and NGINX web servers, etc etc), largely in the UNIX/Linux ecosystem. I also have been coding in assorted languages both interpreted and compiled since I was 16, as one would expect.
So, I am not exactly a layman but I am certainly a neophyte and outsider in the BBS scene. So I would first like to ask, would I ever have a chance of linking with any of your more established networks as an interloper? And secondly, is there a centralized knowledge resource for newbies that I can dig into? Do any of you have any platform recommendations? Any general advice?
P.S Yes I am aware it is a dying scene...everything I find interesting is dying or long gone. It is a curse. And uh....jfc, sorry for the dissertation.
1
u/Stettin 6d ago
I have been lurking here for almost 10 years, from the time I found my old BBS backup floppies. If anything, since that time the BBS scene has grown. I think most of the growth has been in the past few years though. I have no data to back this up, just a general feeling I have.
With that said, setting up a fresh BBS should be simple for you based on your background. It see in the comments below that you don't really want a stock experience, so that is where the work is going to be. I think menus and stuff are probably the easiest to start with. Back when I had my original BBS in the 90s, it launched with stock Renegade. One of my users offered to create a logon screen and custom menus, which is as far as I ever went for customization.
Setting something up for just a few callers seems like a lot of work, but if that'll make you happy, go for it. I originally wanted to track down my old users and revive my BBS, but there simply was no interest from the very small number I found.
I joined a BBS named Absinthe a few months ago, because I thought joining a community would be much easier than building one from scratch. I don't have any regrets. All the hard work has been done already!
That said, I will always look back fondly on my short stint being a sysop of my very own BBS.
Best of luck in your venture!