Articles

• ECHO TALK - Doc Logger on Coordinator Activity
• BBS = Bulletin Board System
• Revitalizing Middle Tennessee Net BBSes
• FIDONET IN THE 2ND MILLENIUM

ECHO TALK
Food for thought from Fido's echomail.
Purloined without permission by D Myers

Doc Logger on the subject of Coordinator activity:

I think your appraisal of the role of *Cs lets them off too lightly when you suggest that they haven't been obstructionist. Every action that Satti has taken towards Region12 or members of our region has been exactly that. Kohl and Hinton engaged in exactly the same activities, getting their knickers in a knot when nodes sought to join an environment where they were made welcome. It may be an academic point to ask how many nodes gave up in disgust when they encountered a Bob Hall, a Dave Hunter, a Hans Toby, a Gary Gilmore, or any of a raft of other people who forgot that the point was communication rather than turf wars.

I'd bet my stuffed armadillo collection that you could lay all of the missing Montana nodes at the doorstep of an NC whose overweening control ambitions throttled the net...ditto for net243.

When the ZC is paralyzed by incompetence, the tribal sense of belonging is lost because the sysop peasantry see the organization in terms of fading, semi-literate relics clinging to power which they weild capriciously. Even a fractional amount of initiative on the part of a *C can bring spirit to the enterprise, and conversely, a bunker-hiding *C can create the opposite effect.

BBS =3D Bulletin Board System
OSP =3D Online Service Provider

Okay, now read the first two lines 3 more times. Now take a look at your system which you are running or logging in to. Is it more like a "BBS' or an "OSP", well most of you should say "OSP", as this is what it really is.

The "BBS" part is still there, if you see or run an effective Bulletins section of the system, then call that section BBS, as the rest of the system is an Online Service Provider.

It is not changing the "BBS",it is changing the name to a better well understood name. "BBS" is nolonger a "BBS" anymore! "BBSes" years ago used to only have local bulletins, but for the past 15 years or more, many systems do not even have 1 useful bulletin!

Why is a "BBS" called a "BBS" when there is no Bulletins?? why? When you can call it an "OSP" and it sounds more like what it really is.

Do you know where the "BBS" term came from? Well I bet most of you probably have no clue, it is quite simple, in the 1970's "BBS" were used for that very reason, to pass out bulletins to whom ever wanted to know, and that was all. Then one day some programming decided to add some extra features to their "BBS" like email support, and public msgs sections, eventualy it became what you see today. But today, it is no longer a "BBS" it is undoubtably an "OSP". The term "OSP" was used back then, but nobody understodd what an "OSP" was, yet they know what a "BBS" was, so everyone continues to use the term "BBS". No that term is over used in our online culture, this needs to be changed to it's proper term.

I'm not saying an "OSP" has too offer internet services, but still can offer BBS-email (OSP-email) , online games, public message domains (echomail) and so on. An ISP does not offer personal online games, msg conferences, inter-ISP games, and so on. This can work with almost every feature of a "BBS" or we should say "OSP".

Overall, if you think about what a "BBS" is today, it can offer a lot and I do mean a heck of a lot more services than any ISP can offer to it's customers (users) and most "BBS"'s of today are free, if not really cheap for extra and special accesses.

It all just makes more sence this way. We can be powerful systems once again. The time is here. The technology is here. The market is here more than ever. Lets use it.

All an "OSP" needs to be called an "OSP" is, what all "BBS"s have now. and if there are NO usefull bulletins, then is NOT a "BBS" at all. A "BBS" has bulletins. An "OSP" has any other online service available, and this DOES NOT have to be an internet service; just services like online games, public message domains, multi-node chat, local private email. Sounds familair?

Just think, try to explain "BBS" to someone who never loged on to one. What do they think is on it? bulletins. Are people always attracted to bulletins? no. If you say "OSP" what will they think? "humm sounds interesting, I wonder what services they offer.", and voila you get some new users. And from there, it is your system that should attract them.

Please try to inform other users and SysOps in your area somehow on what an OSP is and that BBS is only a section of an OSP. Work together, and this old, yet not used very often term will be in it correct place.

Doesn't it just make more sence?

Please pass this information on to your NEC, ZEC, and other local SysOps. thanx

**PS: and remember this**
"call your system what it really is, not something it isn't!"

written by Joel Gathercole aka Greenie
-BBS World Magazine - 26/12/98

Revitalizing Middle Tennessee Net BBSes
An Attempt at Revitalizing Net 116 BBSes
by John Graves, 1:116/35, Net116@nashville.com

In the article in Fidonews Volume 15, Number 8, entitled "Revitalizing a Small Part of Fidonet" by Neil Hoener, 1:128/103, Mr. Hoener describes one of the ways that Pikes Peak Net is trying to revitalize their BBSes. The Pikes Peak Net asked Hilgraeve Inc. for permission to include icons for their BBSes along with an upgrade for HyperTerminal 3.0.

For those who may be unfamiliar with HyperTerminal, it is the basic terminal program Microsoft includes with Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0. Shortly after Windows 95 was released, Hilgraeve began offering an upgrade to the version included with Windows. This upgrade is free for personal use and can be registered for business use for a small fee. This upgrade turns HyperTerminal into a full-featured terminal program that is quite suitable for calling Fidonet BBSes.

Inspired by that article, I contacted Hilgraeve and asked for permission to create an install program that would upgrade the HyperTerminal software that comes with Windows to Hilgraeve's HyperTerminal 4.0 Personal Edition and include "connectoids", links that can be placed on the Windows desktop or anywhere on a Windows 95/98/NT computer, to allow users to call Middle Tennessee Net BBSes with a simple click of their mouse.

Within 36 hours, a representative of Hilgraeve contacted me and gave me their permission. Hilgraeve is quite willing to allow Fidonet Sysops to bundle our BBS connect icons with the upgrade of their product. All they ask is that we send them a copy of the finished install for them to keep for their records and that we do not charge for the upgrade.

We are planning to advertise this upgrade via flyers distributed at local computer stores and on our WWW pages. We'll send a copy free of charge to anyone requesting it. While we will make this available on floppy disk upon request, we think most of the distribution will be done by downloads from web pages and file attaches in email. As a result, the cost to our net will be minimal. I urge anyone searching for a way to increase callers to their BBS to give this method a try.

FIDONET IN THE 2ND MILLENIUM
- An Article by Pete Snidal, Sysop of 1:353.910
- Compuglobal Hypermeganet BBS -

Okay, I know the title's a little too catchy; but it says something important. Fidonet does have a place in the next millenium. The internet hasn't killed what Fidonet does, and it certainly hasn't replaced it. This little article intends to discuss a few things I think we need to consider as owner/ operators of Fidonet systems.

Here is what Fidonet does best: It provides low-cost access to a broad range of Forums/discussion areas which foster communication between computer users all over the planet. These Fidoechoes are spam-free, friendly, and easy to use. They cover a very broad potential range of subjects, and are moderated to ensure a fair to good selectivity of information (staying on topic.)

If we, as sysops, can hold onto this basic idea, and try to provide at least one system in every possible calling area which operates with this basic aim in mind, Fido will live on for a long time.

There's room for gameboards out there, I suppose, but I think it's important to keep the worldwide conference connectivity aspect in the foreground.

What does this mean to the average sysop? It means that, if we want to see Fido stay in business, we must publicize its availabilty in our area, and we must have our systems set up so that any would-be users who call them will be greeted by user-friendly, properly configured software presenting a good basic set of Fidoechoes covering a wide range of interests.

I think it's important to offer a good general list of echoes in the smorgasbord; areafixing and configuring a few echoes you personally may not be particularly interested in will bring more participants to Fido, and will have to improve the quality and quantity of participation in all echoes in the long run. Including your favourites.

Preferably, the Message Menu will show a hierarchical listing of available echoes, starting at the first level with no more than a screenful of headings, such as:

• Local Messaging
• Environmental Issues
• Hobbies
• Humour
• News Postings
• Politics
• Technical Subjects
• Writing

and probably a further set of special interest echoes, such as

• Health
• Women's Issues
• Men's Issues
• Teen Stuff
• Kids Stuff

...and from this main message menu, the user should then be able to make a choice and get a breakdown of any of the given headings to all the echoes which are relevant. Politics, for example, could break down into National Politics, Provincial Politics, Local Politics, Party of Your Choice, etc.

What is Very Important is that the front-end software be intuitive as possible, and that it gives access to a good general interest range of message areas. The intelligent would-be user can be counted on, I think, to make a fairly decent effort to figure out the navigation, if given half a chance. It isn't important that it be GUI or even graphical, I don't think, since text conferencing is the basic issue here - if he can't bother to take the time to read the instructions, or is completely rodent-dependent, what contributions will s/he make to the conferences anyway?

Something we have to consider is that the new user, unlike ourselves, must at first depend on the front-end software to navigate the message base. We who have long ago graduated to offline readers, such as Harvey Parisien's excellent OFFLINE, or the even better alternative of TIMED, sometimes tend to forget what it was like to dial our first bbs and try to navigate around the message base. If it was too difficult, as many of them are, we most likely jumped into a game door, and thus were lost to Fidonet as conference contributors, in some cases pretty well forever. Other prospective users, having discovered that the Internet, as well as the real game computers such as Nintendo et al, do games so much better and thus also are lost forever. So it's very important to present a properly set up front end of good quality, with a good basic set of conferencing echoes to the new user from the git-go.

A really necessary item in bbs front-end software is that it offers the user a chance to see a L)ist of messages available in any base, showing one line per message of such information as originator, destination, and title. Without this option, software which replies to the R)ead a Message command with a request for a message number is pretty meaningless. And if the user has the good humour to offer up a message number at random (unlikely - alt-h is more likely) and unluckily picks a private message, s/he gets nothing for his/her trouble, and is now getting really discouraged. Listing of messages is a very important feature.

The best example of good front-end software, offering this feature, hierachical menus, a good shot at intuitive user-friendly navigation, and still selling for the amazing price of * FREE *, is my personal favourite, Maximus 2.03. If it scared you once, and you shone it on because of all those scary *.ctl files and stuff, have another look at it now. You've likely become much more computer-savvy since then, and it'll look a whole lot simpler.

Why am I writing this? Well, although a grunt sysop in a small town in interior British Columbia, I'm currently on a visit to the Big Smoke, Vancouver - home of net 153. I brought a computer along, and thought I'd peruse the nodelist, and see what good ideas I could take home with me for my own system. And I've found a few good ideas, but what I've found a lot more of is reasons why Fidonet is dying. Poorly configured systems with badly-chosen, in a word, crappy front ends. Message menus running to many screens of very limited-interest technical echoes which should show to the new user as one item on the first hierarchical menu screen. No choices of the most basic echoes of general interest, such as WORLDTLK, ANEWS, LOC.BUYSELL (a BC-wide echo), BC_CHAT, BC_TEEN, ALTMED, FUNNY, or SIMPSONS. No indication that other echoes are possible, if the interest is expressed, let alone a list of these.

There are a number of echoes we all should carry as "bait" to encourage would-be's to become regular users of Fidonet, whether we personally have any particular interest in them or not. Check the 'bone list for ideas.

I ran into 'way too many "attitude" systems, with the sysop's cunning bulletins basically saying this-is-my-system-and-I-don't-care-if-you-ever-call-back-get-screwed. I have no quarrel with this attitude, if the number of the bbs is not publicized on the nodelist and/or on the various lists of bbs's available, but if you're showing this kind of attitude on a bbs representing Fidonet, I for one really wish you'd change your listing to private, since that's obviously what you had in mind in the first place. In other words, don't invite people to Fidonet, and then tell them to screw off.

The only thing that's going to save Fidonet is attracting and holding contributors to the echoes. This is good for all of us, and good for them as well. Fidonet's conferencing is a valuable resource which a lot more people would be using if they were introduced to it through properly configured, hospitable local bbs's, and those of us who care should really do all we can to make this service available to prospective users.