So, I think it's safe to say that we have many alternatives to the HTTP-based web as we know it. Many people claim that gopher is "good enough" but I personally hold the opinion that Gopher is unnecessary. For communication, we have IRC and SSH/telnet based BBS systems, XMPP, and more. For file transfer, we have torrents, Usenet, FTP, XMPP, and IRC again. Dynamic content can be implemented in the aforementioned SSH BBSes.
To gopher enthusiasts, why do you feel the need for Gopher when we have all these much more clean solutions for the replacement for the all encompassing mess that is HTTP and the modern web?
Every one I've tried is absolute garbage. EMail is the only suitable medium for forums.
Gavin Brown
A BBS isn't just a forum, dumbass. WHere do you people even come from?
Oliver Price
Elaborate then, what is a BBS if not just a forum?
Does it need to exclusively serve plain text? Does it need to host its own file server? Does it need a cool landing page with ANSI music and animation?
None of those things are right.
Liam Jones
interesting. please tell me more
Colton Cruz
Opinion discarded.
Ethan Jackson
Usenet isn't meant for file transfer, so please don't just use it as a base to dump your binaries. DCC (if that's what you meant when you were talking about IRC) is also unnecessary as a file transfer protocol when you can just encode the files as text and send them over the network.
Justin Rodriguez
How is HTTP a bigger mess than anything else you mentioned?
Adam Adams
Baitmaster just listed some of the things a traditional BBS typically includes. But there's others too like door games, realtime chat (like Unix talk/ytalk), private messages, and so on. Then he goes on to pretend nothing else matters except the forums, even though tons of people were addicted to games like Trade Wars, and the entire WaReZ scene and demoscene made heavy use of the file areas. Well you can read the history of BBS yourself to see just how full of shit he is. textfiles.com/
But there's alt.binaries groups just for that! Well he can post them on Usenet, since they're just encoded with uuencode, base64, or yEnc. But there's a delay. DCC is immediate and I think(?) it's pure binary, so it saves not only your bandwidth but also doesn't get propagated to all Usenet servers (which may or may not be desired).
Dominic Butler
He's referring to the world wide web (this uses the HTTP as the base protocol) which he considers to be a big mess.
Blake Gray
Baitmaster here. Nigger, we're using a Web BBS RIGHT NOW. One of the "floating" style varieties to be particular. I don't deny that text shells are a generally much cooler and convenient medium for them, but you can't make the phrase "Bulletin Board System" less broad than it actually is. "BBS" and "messageboard" are pretty much synonymous phrases, and acting like it's otherwise is nearly like insisting that it doesn't count as a BBS if you don't connect through telnet.
Since Usenet is pretty much just EMail, there's nothing wrong with occasionally attaching images and other small files with your messages. However, the attitude of just using it to dump your hard drive images onto for redundant backups is what made ISPs stop adopting it (for free, anyway). Funnily enough, it's what hurts the redundancy of those files in the first place. If people had just mostly stuck to text, there'd be many more Usenet providers, and maybe at least one would've bothered keeping everything in a comprehensive archive. But as it is, I don't think there's any one provider which has all of Usenet history on it.
I figured what OP was getting at was that hypertext can effectively be implemented without using a dedicated protocol for it. I'd like to see him come up with how you could possibly link to other servers though, without just typing their domain names and making people start up ssh just to get into them. Maybe some kind of wacky "sshto:" protocol?
Austin Gutierrez
wrong
but a bbs is just a forum
Parker Roberts
Nigger, you're on an imageboard, not a BBS. You know, a place that doesn't look or behave anything like a BBS. Yes, you can fucking type comments here and upload images, PDFs, and videos. That's where the comparison ends. But even there, it doesn't even work out, because there's no sense of community here. We're all faceless "user" and most are even hostile to just tripfags. You can't even tell who the fuck you're replying to most of the time, and that's why Zig Forums is such a shithole with trolls hoping VPNs and using Tor. And threads eventually get purged, so you can't just browse through years of them and reply to an old question or comment. So no, it's not the same fucking thing at all, not even the stuff that seems similar on the surface. You don't know jack about what a BBS is. But you know what's kinda similar to a BBS? Motherfucking SDF.org, that's what.
"Sense of community" has no bearing on what constitutes a BBS. What's important is that you can post "bulletins" and that others can respond to them. As for the software itself, it's no coincidence that 2ch-based BBSs have a dedicated "Email" section (though 8ch's is crappy and doesn't fit enough characters for a full address), they're a direct derivative of text shell-based BBSs. Neither anonymity nor thread purging are mandatory features, just check out tinychan or 4-ch.
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Benjamin Diaz
BULL SHIT. We used to have BBQs and picnics with peeps from the local area code, even played softball with them. Some of them I went to school with. You could chat with famous demoscene or warez d00dz from all over the world. I used to attend 2600 meetings and found some of the BBS guys there too. I got to visit some sysops houses and see all their gear, even one guy who had a bigass Amiga 3000 tower back when that shit was expensive as hell.
Levi Mitchell
Imagine an internet where servers only provide content via REST APIs and there are no browsers. Instead all sites are viewed through client side programs parse the REST responses and request new ones according to what user wants. There are some universal parsers as well but they are not very practical so specialized ones are always preferred. Large service providers like Google often release a client along with their service to encourage users, the Google search viewer can even be used to view results from other engines like bing, but a lot of power users prefer 3rd party FOSS clients that are made by people who don't run the services and are basically the youtube-dl of their domain (but maybe with a GUI), and for new sites compatibility with established clients is very important (unless they're willing to commit resources to writing their own clients). The canonical web content, text, is consumed similar to ebooks or RSS. Emphasis is on content, while formatting is handled by clients, so that everyone gets their own personalized visual look for pages that is consistent across different sites. Ads are often explicitly marked, and clients allow choosing how prominently they will be shown, if at all. Many clients have a "click here to see ads on this page" button, and users occasionally click out of curiosity or desire to support a useful site. Service providers who monetize through ads try very hard to make high quality ads relevant to their audience because otherwise people will stop viewing them.
What do you think of this fantasy universe, y/n?
Ayden Gray
you are retarded
Ryan Adams
SSH + SCP = ultimate solution, just like mr adolf intended
Nicholas Baker
Do you know of some active XMPP conferences I could join?
