Ansiwave BBS, a modern BBS with ANSI art and MIDI music

[Mountain_Skies]

A bit of a tangent, but the trust factor was pretty high with BBSes compared to the Internet of today. Many, including the Renegade BBS I ran, asked for your real name, phone number, and home address when signing up. I never thought twice about giving out that info and never had anyone complain to me about needing to provide it.

[giantrobot]

Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Contrast with Usenet where trolling and flamewars were rampant because instigators could hide behind a veil of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity.

The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.

[karaterobot]

Shout out to a fellow Renegade sysop. I don't believe I asked for anybody's home address, but maybe I've just forgotten. In the town where I lived, most of the BBS people knew each other, plus everyone was in the phone book anyway, so it wouldn't have made a ton of difference.

But I agree that I was so much less concerned about privacy back then. Likely that was out of ignorance, but also because the threat to privacy is different on the internet. In a widely networked world, the .001% of people who are malicious actors still amount to a huge number of malicious actors that didn't exist in a community of a couple hundred people.

[ipaddr]

The kind of bbses I was on required references but never a real name.

I visited big warez bbses locally/Europe.

[j45]

Oh, Renegade.

What would so many have done without Cott Lang democratizing creating BBSes without commercial software.

[IronWolve]

Too bad its not a plugin for browsers, and you could post ansiwave content on any site, browsers just detected its its ansiwave code, like an extension to html.

Imagine reading a tweet or reddit post with ansiwave content imbedded. (Like Microsoft Chat tried with gfx and irc)

Internet really needs to break free from all the control. An overlay network like that disenter browser plugin, you could read comments on any site. Now that all popular sites are closing down comments, kinda shame it died.

Also for video, I remember small rle text stream videos on modem, just black and white, pretty easy to do now with unicode, a small 64x64 text box.. (example).

Also midi's and awesome .sf2 sound banks.

Good times back then, seems the internet lost so much in exchange for government and corporate control.

[DarylZero]

Check out gemini-space and the lagrange browser.

[motohagiography]

Git as a protocol for this brilliant. I don’t know it well enough to know what kind of client side moderation policy enforcement might be viable, or curation tools, but very, very compelling idea.

[hereforphone]

Can it run door games like LORD? Are the ANSI graphics "real"? These are important things to look for in a modern BBS system for me.

[sekao]

Depends on what you mean by real :D It's all unicode text, but you can actually share old school ANSI art in the .ans format because it includes a cp437 to utf8 converter. No door games but i hope to extend the MIDI scripting language to do other things, including eventually making games. Little programs/games embedded directly inside posts is an exciting idea.

[thanatos519]

Why have MIDI music when you can have ANSI music? ESC[<BASIC style music string>^N

I miss the days of my animated, musical ANSI signature!

[ztjio]

Okay but, can I play Legend of the Red Dragon and Barren Realms Elite? Been a few decades since I had my fix...

[bluefox]

http://www.lotgd.net/

[ms123]

There’s also https://midnight.pub (much more low key though!)

[wikidani]

I just took a look into it and I have to say that it was a pretty cool experience! I had to thank you for sharing it!

[numtel]

Now that's a well-designed website!

[Dowwie]

Can a Sysop interrupt a session, entering a chat with the user? Where are the doors?

[ilaksh]

It seems like its not showing people's username, only 'modleader' when he posts (assuming that is the site creator).

[sekao]

There are no usernames, only tags, of which modleader is one (and multiple users can have it). Only mods can edit tags, so you can think of them somewhat like flairs on reddit.

[mmastrac]

Something is really busted with this site and Firefox on the mac. I cannot read it at all.

[ytjohn]

I was thinking the same thing, even considering going into dev tools to try and change the font. Didn't realize it was a firefox on mac thing. I went ahead and opened it in Chrome. It's still pretty difficult font to read, but it is a bit brighter in Chrome.

https://imgur.com/a/KB5irZv

[guytv]

This is really awesome. But I did not see any posts from users, what am I missing?

[gavinray]

This is a cool idea, I dig it!

[charcircuit]

Shouldn't a modern BBS support normal videos, images, and audio too?

[sekao]

I hesitated with the word choice but when i say "modern" i mean that the project dispenses with the implementation details of BBSes that are not relevant to the "BBS experience", such as the use of telnet/ssh, outdated text encodings, and long signup forms asking for copious amounts of personal info. I think adding images/videos would definitely affect the experience.

[jcims]

Personally i would say no. I think the lack of that in HN is part of its recipe for success. A file area would be fine, but not inline.

[peakaboo]

Or maybe it's nice to not have those things. It's a very different feeling.

[Mountain_Skies]

We can compromise and use RIPScript.

[raverbashing]

Well you can download them through {X,Y,Z}-Modem if you want

[aphroz]

Opening this website crashes Chrome on my Android device

[stackbutterflow]

It's a feature.

[nougatbyte]

+1

[zquestz]

Great idea, but it would be nice to have https...