Are BBS-Like Communities Dead?

Fr05t asks: "Since the day the Internet became popular and the good old BBS's faded into the back ground, I myself have had a hard time finding the same kind of active community. Sure there's Slashdot, BugTraq, and IRC, but for whatever reason it seems people remain private and keep to themselves without a who's online option, and a message feature. I do see other Slashdot members posting often, but there are allot more people that read the articles and have opinions that remain in the background. I guess my question is if anyone has found the same kind of thing as the old BBS's?" (More)

I remember back in the 80's when I spent most of my waking hours after school in front of the monitor hooping from one BBS to another. I figure most of the BBSes have evolved in some way, shape or form and made the jump to the Internet. A few of them have evolved into Web Boards, which just don't have that same feel.

When I speak of "that BBS feel", I mean having the ability to go through different sections of the system, actually browsing the messages left by others in a free-forum (as opposed to moderated forums like Slashdot), actively seeing who was on the system at the time (the afore mentioned "who" command), the ubiquitous file transfer areas (which, for the most part have been surplanted by your mega-FTP sites like WcArchive and Freshmeat and others of their ilk). And door games....anyone remember door-games? (I'm still waiting for an online version of TradeWars for the Internet...)

Of course, my free time online has dropped dramatically due to my day-job and Slashdot, so I don't have the time to search for such online communities anymore. If anyone cares to make recommendations to any IBBS systems that may still exist, please feel free.

Comments

Firs^H^H^H^Her, yeah I have

[scrytch]

I've found that MUSHes and MOOs provide much of that community feel. Try LambdaMOO on for size, telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888
(you'll want a client program though, using straight telnet sucks)

BBS' are dead as Bill Clinton's honour

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been dead a long time now. I ran a huge one (for the size of this city) with 32 lines and a satellite feed. When we hooked up the Internet connection it was all over in six months - calls went from 1200 a day to 100 a day in what seemed like no time, now gets about 15 calls a day (and is much smaller) because there are a few people who use it that can't afford a full blown Internet account. We haven't updated the software or hardware in five years (GO Worldgroup!) and will shut it down for the last time on December 23. Sometimes it doesn't even make 15 calls.

Ufie

[QuMa]

Ufie still have a BBS, and they run tradewars. They even have prizes at the moment. Sadly, no free t-shirts ;-).

have a look at http://bbs.ufies.org/ and telnet://bbs.ufies.org

the 386sx. and the 16 color monitor..and the MODEM

[ndfa]

I can completely understand what you are going through. Back when i did not have a computer, I would have to go to a friends house to use his 386 to get on the local BBS. AT that time there was no such thing as an ISP at home (pakistan).
BBS was the only way your computer could connect with others to get files, games and get to share ideas with other computer ppl.
Even when ISP's came about, BBS was the best way to "stay in touch". And of course the fact that an ISP cost an arm and a leg was also a problem.

I think one of the reasons that people dont want that exp. is that there are soo many choices that you just do whatyou want. There are still places where ppl. share ideas (Slashdot, irc etc)
and play games on web pages and all that. Just that they are all different! It would be cool to have a completely INTERCONNECTED set of webpages that allow you to chat, run a "who" command or just post stuff (who cares what) on some b-board!!!

well if there is such a place... point me to the right direction!!!

Fan clubs

[AmirS]

I know a few people who have joined a community through web based 'fan club' sites, mostly for bands. They primarily use message boards and chat rooms to hang out; what's strange is that these people have only started using the 'net recently, thay have never even heard of IRC or BBSs! I guess this is what the current generation of newbies do, and it works quite well.

BBS's are out there...

[legoboy]

BBS's are still out there, but you need to know where to look. Hint: A fair number have telnet access.

I won't post the address to any here, since I don't have any particular wish to crash the two that I frequent. However, I will reccommend the program Zap-O-Com (ZOC) which is available at http://www.emtec.com/zoc/index.html. They have a downloadable shareware version. (Because after all - BBS's are what made shareware work not so many years ago.)

ZOC is a very configurable, ANSI enabled telnet/dialup client. The only hitch is that it is only available for Windows and OS/2.

As for doors on the existing BBS's, Trade Wars 2002, Barren Realms Elite, and Falcon's Eye are still ubiquitous. Trade Wars seems to have the most devoted crowd, and there are many lists of active games available. This is one I found after a quick search. Others exist that are updated nearly daily with information such as the nuber of players, planets, corporations, etc. http://www.tradewars.org is a Trade Wars news site. Not sure how good it is.

Anyway, I encourage any people out there who haven't had experience with BBS's to try them out. The community still exists, the only real downside is that it is a lot more trouble to meet someone face to face (should you want to) than it was when everyone was in the same city/town. (Damn you, Mosaic, damn you)

------

Dead

[gutterface]

I was involved pretty heavily in the BBS scene in the 80's and early 90's. It was one of the reasons I came so late to the internet. The scene is completely dead as far as I'm concerned.

So far I haven't come across anything having the same feel. I suspect there are two reasons. The main one is that BBSes had a strong local base, with the same cast of people. Everyone knew your name, you probably met many of the people behind the aliases (remember GTs (get togethers)?). The turnover was way lower than the equivalents we have today.

The fact that the Internet has allowed information to be specialized is another reason. Communities are highly focused on particular niches. Slashdot serves the open-source digerati types. There are communities based around the X-Files, etc. These communities tend to be too large compared to BBSes, and have people that may be too similar to each other.

Finally, I haven't found a decent interface for communities. Mailing lists are way to primitive, and web bulletin boards too klunky. The BBS Interface is still superior to anything I've seen thusfar.

Peace.

Lurkers unite... or something

[h2odragon]

I can beat the guy with the 386. I remember fondly the days wasted with my 286 and a 1200 bps modem, racking up some impressive phone bills. Anybody else remember the first public-access Usenet node? Joliet One, or something like that, an AT&T 3b2 IIRC; it was before the Great Renaming. It always seemed to me that the lurkers and leeches made up the majority of the BBS population even back then.

The 'net as we now know it is geared less for interactive communication than the BBSen were, and the proportion of "quiet folk" has increased. That's a natural consequence of lowering the entry hurdles: once you'd managed to find a good BBS back then, you were more likely to say something just to prove to yourself that you'd done it.

I recall a SysOp buddy of mine pulling the plug on his active and growing board because the "real user ratio" had fallen too low for him. He said he wanted people to communicate, and never realized that the readers, the audience, the lurkers, were at least as important to comunication as those who wrote.

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[Our Man In Redmond]

Not to start a round of the Grandpa Game, but . . .

My first BBS experiences were with a TRS-80 and a 300 baud acoustic modem (the one you would fit your telephone headset in). Back in those days (1980) you could comfortably fit every known BBS in the world on both sides of an 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper in Courier 12 type. I once dialed into a board in England from Colorado just to prove I could do it (stayed all of about a minute ).

Now of course I can connect to demon.co.uk and not pay any more than I do to pull in /. It's like most things in life -- we remember the good old days with nostalgia for the communities and the adventure, but we forget the slow speeds and astronomical phone bills.
--

BBSs, MUDs, and Freenets, Oh My!

[grahamkg]

Here's a link to the latest telnet bbs list:

http://www.thedirectory.org/telnet

It lists around 600 or so, and is updated every month. For muds, see

http://www.mudconnect.com/

Freenets, which do seem to be dying, are listed here:

http://www.lights.com/freenet/

What's really funny is that people are posting about BBSs and trying to keep others away from them. Hmmm...

Graham

Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[Christopher B. Brown]

In the BBS days, you were limited to connecting to BBSes in the local community, as LD charges to go further made anything more extensive impractical.

The Internet immediately "scales" to handling ludicrously large numbers of interconnected users. If you've got the name of:

• A person's email address
• A Usenet newsgroup
• A web site

You have random access to that location, and little reason to have any concern about whether this be in the same city, state, country, or even continent.

Last night, I got an email message from someone in New Zealand complaining that some of my web pages were mislinked/missing. This was because I was, at that very moment, in the process of installing updates, after having just nuked the existing copies. Apparently there's not a time to do maintenance that's not "prime time" somewhere.

In the old days, Star Trek fans would have to get together in person, which limited connections to occasional "conventions" and local community meetings. With Usenet, this provides the ability for everyone to post on the same newsgroup, and with tens of thousands of fans, this results in daunting quantities of traffic.

That heads us now towards the problem... BBSes limited community sizes to the size and diversity of the people in the local community. Usenet and the Web expand this to allow literally hundreds of thousands of participants in each of a multitude of fora. Unfortunately, you can't usefully have hundreds of thousands of participants in any kind of forum. A Slashdot thread with a mere 200 messages is effectively unreadable.

The result is that only those that are, in some manner, "Extreme," wind up being prime participants. A Star Trek newsgroup will have a small set of experts (such as one might be "expert" on such) that participate usefully, and those that are less expert will either:

• Be intimidated out of participating as they feel inadequate to really contribute, or
• Not care that they're inadequate, and bluster through to produce whatever they wish, which leads down the road to Inane Flame Wars.

That doesn't have to be Star Trek; it can apply equally well to any other topic with many "somewhat interested parties."

This is almost exactly the same idea as how single people have a hard time connecting personally/socially in large cities even though there may be vast quantities of other singles. The vast quantity of other people is off-putting.

And the same is true of apartment hunting. Some years ago, I moved to Toronto, and started apartment hunting by acquiring copies of the local newspaper. The thousands of apartment listings were less useful than having mere dozens, as the sizable lists had too much "chaff" to plough through. I wound up using word-of-mouth, via a friend-of-a-friend, to locate a place.

Having a virtually infinite number of links is thus as bad as having no links, if you have no good way of choosing from the infinite quantities.

The difficulty with large communities

[alhaz]

It's interesting that the preference towards "free" discussion was brought up, as opposed to moderated forums like slashdot.

All you have to do is read /. comments at -1 to see what it would be like without moderation. Did you really want to see all that? Yes, sometimes, it's good to see what's down there, to keep an eye on the moderation, or moderate. (Remember, it's always better to use that point to moderate up an interesting AC than it is to use it to moderate down a boorish but otherwise harmless +1 user)

The problem with really large communities tho, isn't so much the signal to noise ratio as it is the way a large community can distance a person from the whole.

BBSs gave us, as users, the same sense of belonging that a small town gives someone. It's not that you feel a member because you're like everyone around you, it's that you feel you can relate to those around you.

This doesn't mean that it's impossible for a large city to have functioning communities, it means that it's harder, in the relatively metaphor-poor arena of the internet, to develop a functioning sub-community that's small enough to create the same sense of belonging.

Lots of people post comments on slashdot. Even more read them. Nearly everybody recognizes Bruce Perens, even if you don't know who he is outside of slashdot. I'm sure one or two of you recognize me, but it's not the same. It's the division between the luminaries and the public that makes the distinction uncomfortable, but it's unavoidable in a large forum, and it's nobodies fault.

It's not that it makes anyone feel jealous, it's the sense of disconnection.

If this was a BBS, I'd be throwing these words before a bunch of people I kinda feel that i sorta know, that i sorta relate to. That would allow me to adjust the way i phrase things so that my ideas are accessable to a particular group of people that i'm trying to communicate with.

Here, well, I don't have any sense of the identity of my reader. It's a lonely feeling, when you look at it that way.

But in another way, it's somehow empowering to know that possibly thousands of anonymous geeks will paruse my feeble ramblings, and maybe even approve of what i had to say.

NOT dead.

[Signal 11]

No. I ran a BBS (Eye of the Storm) in western wisconsin right before the internet hit paydirt. Fun little thing, I put alot of time into that. It didn't die from negligence or disuse, but rather from parental problems. But that's beside the point. BBSing itself is dead, but not the idea. I'm shocked and appalled by the impersonal nature of the web - many corporations are running "one-way" websites - no feedback allowed. Behind all the glamor and glitz there are real people back there, and I'd like to talk to them. But webservers weren't designed for two-way communication: they were designed for "I post,you view." It works as designed - just not the way I envisioned the "information age" to come about.

So I got to talking with some of my friends about this, and they too miss that "community" feeling that BBSing had. I think it's alot like why people don't vote - they don't think it'll make a difference. Statistically, it doesn't. But when you have 10 of your friends at a private party, isn't it alot more fun than a hundred people who you "kinda" know at a party? I'll tell you what's more fun - the 10 person party. The reason is that what you say makes a difference, and everybody can listen to everybody else.

I don't believe the web is going to give many people that community feeling they're looking for.. atleast not the conventional way of using it. But I am doing research and such on developing a kind of "online" bbs - not the cheezy kind, but a real bbs that is modern, uses the technology, and stretches the limits. It's a daunting task. Slashdot is one way of doing it, but even that is still largely "I post, you view". I don't have any answers, but I do know there's a need - I want to fill that need, if only for myself.

--

The downfall of the BBS.

[sinnergy]

You make a very good point. It seems as though the closest thing that I've ever used that comes close to a BBS-like community is MUD (or one of it's variants). Peronsally, I used to be heavily involved in batmud (telnet batmud.bat.org). It's still a thriving community (with the required obnoxious personalities) and I hope to be able to have the time to play and/or socialize there again.

I admit that it's not the same as the traditional BBS. There are a few out there, and many that support some of my old favorites (door games (BRE, SRE, etc.). I sometimes yearn for the "old days" of my 14.4 and ANSI telecomm program, but then I realize, too, the benefits that the net has today.

As it is, Cleveland, Ohio, lost a landmark in online communities this fall when the Cleveland Freenet (owned and operated by my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University) was shutdown. The shutdown invoked scathing critcism and many flames directed toward both the President of the University (who was only in office for a few months) and the VP of IS (who was summarily fired a couple of months later). Still, even though the Freenet model was a trailblazing way of connecting people and allowing the "common folk" to explore this wonderous new thing called the Internet back in the early 90s, by even 1996 the system became so deprecated that it was becoming nothing more than an embarrassment and a money pit for the University. The "communities" that once thrived (including a very active local IRC, one that I still miss to this day and one which I can proudly say I found my current girlfriend of 3 years and potential wife on) were no longer active, except for a few strong holdouts by a stalwart few. In the place of the active lurkers and posters alike came the kiddy-porn mongers, the leechers and flamers. Granted, they were always there, but the ratio increased to a degree where it was no longer any "fun" to use it.

I feel like and old fogey when I reflect how things were in the late 80s and early 90s. People that didn't use BBSes will never truly understand the quaint charm they held and the sense of community they brought about. However, I can say for certain we'll be saying these same things about the Internet in 10 years. We'll be telling our children about how we used to have to type in "slashdot.org" this and "http://" that. I presume that the guts of the net will become so transparent we'll experience another great abstraction of the methodolgy in which we obtain and contribute information.

I've rambled enough. I need to mud...

Would you want to go back?

[Ion-Flux]

...to the way it used to be?
I'm 15, and spend most of my time discussing physics/philosophy on irc. I consider that my community, and i love it. But now and then I come accross one of those telnet bbs like systems, or I read about them in *.txt. They seem so much more complex than what we now have, like the ruins of a long dead civilization. And i ask myself: "self, did you miss all the fun?".
What i'd like to know is if those of you who've lived thru the development of all this prefer or dislike the 'modern' community relative to the BBS community?

Re:free, multiplayer, bbs-style strategy game...

[Sun Tzu]

Well, not quite tradewars, but completely rewritten for the Internet. Check out starshiptraders.com either using a web browser, or, for you original BBSer's, telnet straight in to port 23.

The SST design is derived from Czarwars, one of several tradewars-genre BBS door programs from the '80s. SST has been online in various forms for three years and is still in beta testing. It's pretty solid but remains in testing due to endless feature creep. ;)

We are currently running 10 games in an on-going ladder-style tournament. The games all reset on Thanksgiving (Thursday) and each has room for a few hundred more players. There are usually about 500 active players (well, active ships -- it's hard to tell how many actual people log in). The web mode serves about a half million pages a week and accounts for 75% of the traffic -- with the remainder of the activity being through telnet.

BBSes, reinvented...

[Robotech_Master]

BBSes, I feel, were a strong example of the human need to build a community with like-minded people.

I'm one of those people who you might say spans two worlds; I got into college in Fall, 1991, here in Springfield, Missouri. One of the first things I did was figure out how to make the university's modem pool dial out and voila...a new universe of BBSes presented itself to my wondering gaze. Likewise, there was a student-run campus BBS on the ISN (Information Systems Network, a primitive networking system something like a cross between a phone system and Ethernet) with 8 connections (later expanded to 16) which featured chat and message boards, but no doors. It was called COEPIS, for the College of Education & Psychology which was where it was located, and nobody could quite figure out how to pronounce the name. I still have a T-shirt from it.

I made a lot of friends on COEPIS, a couple of whom I still know now--they're employed by the university, I'm still studying at it, the eternal student. But COEPIS wasn't long for the world; it only lasted a couple of years, more on that in a bit...

I got accounts on a dozen different BBSes, soon whittled down to one or two as my interest dwindled. I dabbled a bit in FidoNet, too. I made friends via COEPIS, and a few acquaintances through the local BBSes; I even schlepped down to the weekly BBS get-together at a local pizza joint a couple of times. This was sort of a community within a community...all the geeks could get together and talk about computers and things. We weren't completely likeminded, but we were closer than a lot of the other people in the town.

BBS doors were kind of fun for a while, but didn't really hold my interest too much, because I discovered...the Internet. I came into the computer lab one day, noticed some of my COEPIS friends doing something that looked interesting, and said, "Hey, how do I get into that?" "I'll set you up." Thus came my first encounter with the Internet: MUCKing via RexxTalk on a VM/CMS box. In those days, Internet was not a gratis-for-all-students deal; it was a "get a faculty sponsor so you can get an account" sort of thing.

Gradually, as time marched on, the Internet became much more accessible, students got an honest-to-god Unix box to play on and Ethernet replaced ISN...and COEPIS died. The Internet killed it.

The Internet made it possible to find people who were >90% interest matches, rather than the 60-70% that were the closest local BBSes came, just because there was suddenly a much greater pool of people to search through. There were whole newsgroups (mailing lists, chat forums, eventually webpages, etc.) devoted to niche interests, be they anime, Star Trek, belly-button lint collections, or almost anything you could think of. Once it became available to The Great Unwashed Masses, how could something with a strictly local focus possibly compete?

We have the same functions available to us via the Internet as we did on local BBSes. E-mail, USENET and mailing lists for discussion groups, IRC/MU*/ICQ/webchat for chat forums, and so forth. The only difference is that there are many more participants now, and we're not guaranteed to find the same people in one area that we know in another. Our community is that much greater in scope.

Of course, we do sacrifice the community closeness inherent in the BBSes...but do we really miss it enough to want to use it? I don't know...I haven't checked in with the local BBSes in a couple of years; I'm not sure how many people still do use them. I suppose that for the old-timers, and the people who still have a lot of fast friends in the area, there's still some appeal...but for this new, younger generation, I expect that the rapid explosion of the 'net more or less speaks for itself.

Oh yeah?

[DragonHawk]

I can win this hands down.

Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.

Oh yeah? Well, in my day, all we had were tin cans and string! You had to attach the can directly to the CPU with tinfoil! We were lucky to get two characters per second, and were happy if we just got one!

You youngsters these days, why, you have no idea how good you got it. We used to have a 4K disk the size of this *room*, and you didn't hear us complaining! Oh no, we knew to be grateful for what we had! Why, we didn't even have keyboards at first! We had to *chip* the characters into the screen! With our teeth!

And ya know what else.... why.... um.... what was I saying?