Re: Hey Guys

>   Well thats a long road back, but not necessarily a hard road. We (the BBSer
>   the SYSOPS, Ex-Sysops) have to become more proactive. Thinking about this I
>   as sure as you are that the BBS scene can again succeed. Take for example:

I definitely think the BBS scene can succeed again, but not in its old form.
The main strength of the old BBS scene was that you actually knew the people
you were talking to.  You didn't have newsgroups with 1,000 posts per day, or
spam coming at you from every corner.  The other advantage they had was the
users wanted to be part of a community.  On the net, you get people just
looking for pr0n, ways of making money, and other things that aren't conducive
to a community feeling.

>   MUDS.. there are thousands of them, all text based role-playing, and yet yo
>   can log onto 90% of those thousands anytime of the day and see a minimum of
>   10 people online and max (on some) 100+... If we could get that kind of
>   advertising it could succeed.

This is the type of thing that killed BBSes, IMHO.  BBSes used to be a great
place to go for everything in one place.  You had great message areas with
good discussions between a few people on interesting topics, you had chatrooms
on the larger BBSes, they were a great way to get some interesting
games/files without paying long distance, and challenging each other to online
games was great

Now, the WWW, IRC, FTP servers, and other internet technologies have taken
over every aspect of what BBSes used to be.  This was the very reason most
people stopped calling my BBS.  There simply was nothing left on my BBS that
they couldn't get on the net.  And they could get MORE of it on the net.  They
could get any file they wanted, they could play Quake against people all over
the world, IRC had hundreds of people online, instead of just 2 or 4.

I personally think that BBSes will succed on the internet in only one of two
forms.  There will be a few "retro" BBSes that will run all the old software,
let people play old online games, etc, and people who remember BBSing will get
a kick out of it for a while.  The Ufie BBS is a good example of this.

The other BBSes that will resurface are those that transform themselves to
take better advantage of the features the net has to offer.  There are already
tons of websites that are close to what BBSes could be again.  Places like
slashdot.org are great web sites for interesting conversation, places like
mplayer.com or the MS Gaming Zone have strong gaming communities around them.
The next generation of BBSes need to do everything they can to draw users
with similar interests to the same place on the net, they need to have a
web-based interface, and they need a way to keep out the spammers.

Personally, I would love a community site that had some good discussions, some
more popular files mirrored, some way of searching for Quake/HL/etc servers
that were running, and some sort of gateway/portal into IRC.  Basically
pulling all of the internet equivalents of the old BBS services into one
community-oriented site.  Some commercial sites are starting to do this.  We
need more hobby sites of a similar nature.

Richard