Imagining a community oriented BBS platform with gopher as a central feature

I’m just sort of brainstorming/daydreaming about something. Is it a suggestion for lunduke bbs? I don’t know. Is it feasible? Maybe. Just throwing some thoughts around… maybe some ideas to look at here for the future.

Some background before I get to the meat…

I love to play around with BBS. Some of the most fun I’ve had in recent times was BBS servers that had IRC chat built in. Just a lot of fun to chat with people. I don’t really like that these tend to be regular IRC channels that are accessible anywhere on the internet … it kinda sucks the air out of the whole BBS experience. My opinion.

I’m also interested in gopher, but the nature of the old technology means it has some serious visibility limitations. People find gopher holes, read them, maybe bookmark them if you’re lucky, and then usually forget about them and never think to go back again. Gopherholes become memoryholes. If the reader does actually go back, there’s a good chance the author hasn’t bothered to up update, because more often than not, they end up going stale/abandoned rather quickly … because people never bother to go back to read them, rinse repeat :recycle:

And now for the ideas…

Imagine a new “platform” that sort of combines some of this old tech into a one stop shop.

You sign up with a new account and give yourself a username. This username is used for the BBS. In a user’s account settings, they can configure a gopherhole address that they host themselves, perhaps a gemini address, perhaps ham call signs even… etc.

The platform and the BBS actively encourages the use of gopher holes to function somewhat like a user profile/phlog directly tied to the BBS user. Not only is gopher encouraged, it is a central feature of the platform, this is key.

When you log into the BBS, there is live (IRC) chat where you can BS about whatever with fellow nerds. The IRC server is running on the local server and accessible only from within the BBS itself.

Since chat server access is restricted to the BBS, it can potentially be offered as a premium subscriber perk.

The BBS has a feature that gives each user of the BBS some kind of “profile” screen that can be accessed from various places throughout the BBS.

For instance, in the BBS chat, there is a list of usernames off to the side. You can select a user and “go to profile”. In various other places on the bbs where you can see other peoples’ usernames (in games, message boards, etc) you can “go to profile”.

From a user’s profile screen you can directly access their personal gopher hole.

Access to the profile screens can be a premium subscriber perk.

The BBS would have custom software to render gopher pages from directly within the BBS.

Another feature idea would be to be able to somehow “bookmark” user profiles. And there would be a main menu option on the bbs to access your list of saved user profiles to quickly access and read their gopher pages.

This could also be a premium perk.

Maybe: Gopherholes could potentially be (optionally) hosted by “the platform” as a feature of the platform, if the user doesn’t want to host it on their own domain. Seems there are may be ways to do this with Gophernicus using “virtual hosting”, but it sounds kinda sketchy. See here

The visibility limitation of gopher described way up there :point_up: is now much improved. Suddenly there is a community… suddenly there is a reason to keep your gopher site updated… suddenly there is a reason to go back and check your BBS buddy’s gopher site.

Non-premium users of the BBS have time limits and get booted after an hour or two. Premium users have no time limit.

It would require some custom coding, obviously… so it wouldn’t be a particularly a particularly easy task, but it sure would be fun I think, and a unique way to make old tech cool again.

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I have a BBS oriented community, and am part of the bigger BBS oriented community… BBSes are by definition a community oriented “thing” aren’t they?

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Both Mystic and Synchronet have this natively I believe, Mystic’s “Node chat” is very IRC like, and MRC originally took that and joined one BBS up to multiple BBSes, and that’s how MRC grew into what it is today.

This seems similar to a shell account type perk… in a similar approach, I offer each of my BBS users a “finger” address and .plan editor, you can finger me to see what it looks like by finger meatlotion@bbs.erb.pw (I won’t spoil the surprise by pasting it in here).

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You can also try fingering my good friend Paulie420 by using finger paulie420@bbs.erb.pw to see how his looks compared to mine.

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Maybe it is just my relative youth, being only 37, which around here is young, but the finger command is still hilarious to me. I find it hard to believe that the person who invented it wasn’t having a laugh calling it that.

Surely I should buy him a drink first.

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Nah he’s quite easy

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