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Advice On A New-School Old-School BBS
An anonymous reader asks I am thinking about setting up a local "community" network over WiFi minus internet connection. In other words, I would like to run a small server isolated from the web as an experiment in small scale networks (e.g., serving a café-heavy one-block radius.)
I have plenty of clever ideas -- discussion/gripe boards, weird artistic projects -- anything to bring back the old-school BBS memories where online users were drawn from a single geographic location. But everything I've learned so far is how to act as a small node on someone else's network. How can I make my own -- and make it wireless?
Google doesn't pull much up that I can find: it is mostly targeted towards those building a (free or profit) Internet access point." (Read on for more.)
" Does anybody have sources of information for how to learn about setting up the network I have in mind? Basic tutorials and those covering more advanced issues such as security would be very helpful. Finally, is there anyone out there with real world experience? Beyond imparting technical help, do you have suggestions for implementation? What worked, and what didn't? Did the lack of internet access make the project unpopular? (And if you did provide internet access as a teaser, how did you handle liability and financial issues?)"
(This reminds me of the Community Memory Project; can anyone point to some modern equivalents?)
I've thought of this myself for my own city. I'm not ready to take on such a project, but in the event that i change my mind, these would be the first issues i would adress:
1) who is paying for equiptment?
2) where is the equiptment going to be located?
3) how many people are acutally interested (is it going to be a wasted effort)?
4) servers to host content
5) Mesures to prevent people from causing problems (dhcp servers, hackers, viri and such)
6) will DNS be used?
7) Scale of network vs ammount of information being communicated
#7 is most important because if you have alot of people using this system as though it were a LAN, general broadcasts will be flooding your entire network. you will need *real routers* to segment parts of the network.
*real routers* means they're not intended for home use (ie: Linksys, d-link, etc...)
#4,5,6 & 7 all assume this network is large - predict this! its less work later if this really takes off for ya.
oh, and Seattle wireless has a network like this so you'll want to take a peak there to see how they have things set up.
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
If you want 80s old school, you could do something akin to the WELL. I had something similar in my old building complex (one computer on my floor where people would just post crap for everyone else to see) but it turned into a sort of an internal craigslist. That's not a bad thing, though, and the landlord bought it from me for one month's rent. In the new building I wired up a half-dozen neighbors on my network, installed ICQ, and showed them how to post to a tiny news server I had setup. They're more keen on surfing the web, though, so I just limit their bandwidth to 1 mbps. As for a BBS, well, that was a little before my time, but not so much before that I don't remember feeling ripped off after waiting an hour to download what I thought would be hot pr0n. Turned out to be a girl in a bikini. In a bikini fercrissakes!
I also reply below your current threshold.
I mean seriously - the only people using them anymore are for nostalgia.
I remember back in the day, I had four modem lines in my parents' basement churning over my 10base2 Lantastic setup with a variety of 286 and 386 boxes. I could get 80-120 calls a day - everything from file leechers to door game players to people who liked to write perverted endless stories.
It all ended about 1995 or so - some eked out for a few more years, but the thrust of the community turned to the Internet long before that.
I don't see the point. Set up a web board or something, that's about as close as you can get. If you feel completely compelled, you might want to investigate Citadel. I note some halfway decent Citadel ports to a telnet based system.
Of course it's just like old Citadel, ie, crappy like wwiv, but most of the good BBS systems got bought by commercial vendors and then summarily dropped into the bit bucket when it didn't turn out to be profitable in the late 90's - pretty much what happened to Wildcat, Searchlight, Pc-board, proboard, etc etc etc.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I've thought of a setup kinda like this in the context of a college campus. As the school starts to take more control of their network, I've thought about a system which would use some kind of ad-hoc intranet (although I don't know much about ad-hoc networks) which wouldn't rely at all on the school's infrastructure. Even for simple activities like chat, I think it'd be cool (and harder to identify who's who.) Just an idea that came to me after spending some time on FreeNet at school...
But while it is not strictly connected to the internet, there is nothing stopping an individual connecting a rooftop access point to a router and then to a home DSL connection. You then create a VPN to the internet via community mesh. This allows you to log on to your own home DSL connection from any location that can access the wifi mesh.
In Australia there is a country-wide IP assignment mechanism to eventually get continent-wide community wifi.
You should map all .com, .net, .org and for that matter any "real" web request to a "Hello World!" webserver that explains that your WiFi link isn't offering a connection to the Internet, instead it's a one-of-a-kind location that's offering...
.something domain (maybe the name of your city?) that isn't a normal TLD. This would help to distinguish your network from the Internet.
The interesting thing to do would be to setup a local
It would also scale if the network is ever connected to the Internet, and external intenet users could even access the sites by changing their DNS settings.. perhaps even extending to local ISPs picking up this network and offering it as a local service, only when you're connected through them.
Speak before you think
Ten years ago I ran a BBS with a friend, and it was fairly successful. A lot of it had to do with the fact that we had a lot of content that wasn't around elsewhere. One problem I forsee is soembody mirroring in real time to the web, then you won't have that unique content anymore. I mean you'll still have it, but it won't be unique.
So first off, you have to assume that anything you have will leak off to the larger network. That doesn't mean that all is lost, you just have to make sure that your content is compelling enough to grab people and make them connect up, post, and participate.
I would suggest a MUD as a possible hook to grab people. They're fun, they're community based by nature, and they're addictive. Or something like TradeWars 2002, etc... Back in the BBS days people would log in all the time to play the games, and then once they were on they'd also post messages, exchange files, and communicate.
I would also suggest having informal get-togethers every once in a while. In Ithaca, NY we used to have "geekfests" every month where you could meet and greet people from the BBS community, people would bring their computers and game or show off their latest programming projects, etc... That really anchored the community aspect. Lately Fark has been doing something similar, having parties for FARK users in various cities, and then the photos and some highlights get posted back to the main site. While I don't participate extensively in FARK, it seems like that is building some sense of real community there.
In essence, if you have enough content to hook people, and you facilitate the initial socialization period, you can build a community that will endure.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Without a doubt, nothing brings people together like a Citadel system. Since it's focused on people and not file leeching, you get a stronger sense of community.
What's more, modern Citadel systems give you telnet and web-based access, so the old-skool BBS'ers can have their 80x24 fun while the newbies can partake of the community from the comfort of their favorite browser. The e-mail system is built-in, sporting SMTP/POP/IMAP, and you get an instant messenger and a chat system completely integrated. It's a totally self-contained package that gives you the community-oriented site you're looking for.
If you want to see one in action, just click on the BBS link in my signature. I've been doing this for 16 years and loving it. BBS's are not dead, by any means.
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Better yet, why not just run a real, modern 32bit BBS? There are both *nix and windows versions and it's opensource ;) Plus, it uses the mozilla team's javascript engine, so you can write your own modules to extend the functionality quickly (the IRC service included with synchronet is written in javascript). I'm currently writing a new command shell for my BBS using JS. And of course, Synchronet runs nearly all of the old 16bit DOS doors (easier to achieve on Windows but not impossible on *nix using a dos emulator). I run LORD, Trade Wars, Clans, and other older games on my BBS that are (interestingly) still popular (over 150 user accounts and climbing - not bad for a new BBS started a year ago in the post-BBS era!)