In between the hell that is inventory at the day job and more time spent in the Zone playing Stalker Anomaly I’ve been finding myself working heavily on my Bulletin Board System, Final Zone. Yeah, the same BBS that I shut down for 10 days at the beginning of December then began to miss, I’ve been giving it the TLC it deserves, with some tweaks here and there and some much needed maintenance.
As it stands I’ve gotten the two FTN networks I’m on, fsxNet and Micronet, in good order. Well, I can’t seem to get files to come from the network on Micronet (as in, get them to tic process properly… obviously my file areas are incorrect) but fsxNet, that’s now working a treat, for the most part: that actually had broken for a time (I missed a memo) but now it’s all back in operation.
Another problem I had was my file areas being, well, broken. That is, on the web portal, they were…. as was FTP. On FTP it turns out I simply wasn’t using the correct settings for uploads, but in an effort to resolve the file areas being broken I nuked the entire file base and started fresh.
After learning what settings to use to properly upload files via FTP I found myself tossing artpack collections and the like on there to provide some appropriate content. That made me quite happy to see populate the files section and, for the hell of it, this morning I tossed the old files previous users had uploaded onto the board and things were fine — whatever had broken my file listings previously didn’t cause an issue this time and, barring the fact that now all the uploads are attributed to me, and any extended info provided on upload is lost, everything is up and available to registered users. I’ve stopped guest uploads to prevent strange HTML uploads that could be malicious, and to save bandwidth I’ve left only a small subset of files available to guests, Not like the other content isn’t available from places like textfiles.com, I’ve just provided it to provide an experience, especially for users who call into Final Zone using appropriate period machines to take advantage of 30 year old games and ANSI art!
Message areas have been expanded by me finally joining GameNet, a sadly mostly dead network, but one I hope will stick around and possible spring back to life. While I’m not a fan of the gaming community at large I do think BBS interested gamers would be at least a slightly better group to chat with. It would at least likely be fresh discussion. Again, it’s sad that network has virtually no traffic but, well, until it dies it does me no harm to be on it.
Of course there are things I still can’t address — the board is still on Synchronet 3.18b as I still am unable to get 3.19 properly running. I still believe it’s an issue related to Windows on that server, and, as mentioned before, given I’m not missing out on anything too much it’s not super critical that I do upgrade. 3.19 and the in development 3.20 do have quite a few improvements and additions, but they are nothing critical and everything is otherwise, give or take, working fine, so there’s not much reason for me to try to rush to update things. I’ll just wait until I move the BBS to a new system to upgrade the board software.
The biggest problem is, of course, getting users. Everyone in the BBS scene knows the phrase “there are more Sysops than users” and it’s quite true. What’s worse is that I’m pretty sure there are more BBS’s than Sysops! The point is getting people to call into a BBS is a bit hard — we’re talking inside the BBS scene, getting users is a pain, but that’s the name of the game these days. We’re a weird bunch, those of us who for whatever reason cling to this outdated way of networking, but it has a charm that just can’t be duplicated on the web. The idea that, with the right equipment, a TRS-80 or C64 could access a board just as easily as any old computer is even more badass, and I think is the true reason many of us get into this hobby — the idea that something, while still maturing and moving ahead with time, equally stays timeless — at its core, plain text messages being sent to and from terminals…. that’s where the magic is. Directly connecting to a specific system that may be running in someones bedroom and having a chat. It’s just far more pleasant of an experience than something like Facebook, X/Twitter, and the like could ever be.
That’s why I keep it going. It’s the idea that I could help provide this experience to someone out there. To provide my own little space to escape the hell that is social media and the web at large.