UPDATE: A couple of days after publishing this entry I realized I missed running the BBS. After giving the server a much needed cleanup I set everything back up as it was. The BBS is once again operating as normal.
Last week I made the decision that, after 3 and a half years of operation, I would for the foreseeable retire my bulletin board system Final Zone.
This came for a few reasons. I have been hosing the board from a Dell PowerEdge server for the vast majority of its life, and while the hardware is in fine shape I did grow tired of it running 24/7. More importantly, this system is running Windows Server 2008, and the most recent builds of Synchronet, for whatever reason, failed to run properly on it — thus locking it to version 3.18b, something I didn’t quite feel happy being forced to stay on.
Now sure, I could have switched the server over to BSD, or Linux, but there are / were some Windows specific features and aspects of it that I took advantage of, and intend to continue to in the future. Also, sure, I could have upgraded the operating system, but I quite honestly do not have the drive to go through with that currently, for multiple reasons.
I did try to, in effect, port, the BBS over to a Linux VPS, and that had varying levels of success. Some features would not enable properly, like the web interface, and while I could transport messages, thus keeping the core of the BBS intact, no other configuration settings would transfer, nor would my userbase — everyone would have to register again were I to continue with that option.
In the interest of keeping things pure, I decided against the Linux VPS path and made the decision to simply retire it. To be honest, while I absolutely loved running it, it had begun to languish as the original user base stopped logging in and new users never stuck around — the typical life of a BBS, honestly. While I was intending to begin a fresh advertising campaign, the fact that it was, beyond local messages, nothing special made me feel this may not truly be worth it in the long run, at least in how I’m feeling currently.
I also hated having the open ports on my internet connection. Something about that just really annoyed me and I feel like it did have at least some impact on my overall network performance, but I’m certain that’s really just a psychosomatic phenomena.
Whatever the reasons, after spending over 24 hours trying to find a solution, I realized the best course of action was to let it go, at least for now, and maybe come back to it again in a few years with a new system and, if I can splurge on it, a dedicated internet connection for it. That would be pretty kick ass!
Final Zone as a place isn’t dead, however — far from it. Final Zone has been reborn as traditional web forums at the url http://www.final-zone.net. While, yes, they are nothing special and I’m still working on fleshing out the message areas, it’s at least a solution which I honestly think may work out well in the long run so long as I remember to promote them and actually do something with them.
My goal is to always create an oasis, in a sense, for people who just don’t quite fit in with the most common branches of modern internet geekery and the like, and I hope that maybe this will pan out better to that end.
I’m paying for the domain name, I might as well use it, right?
Right, that’s the end of that. I hope anyone who used the BBS had fun, and I may create another one when the time is right. Until then, that’s that.