Anonymous public voicemail inbox

[technothrasher]

I don't know why, but this reminded me of going to school in the early 90's, we'd go through the university's voicemail system inputting random phone numbers and trying the default password, '0000', which meant the voicemail on that number had never been set up. When we found one, we'd record a song as the greeting. We then posted notes by the various public phones on campus for our 'dial a song' directory so anybody could enjoy a song, like a big public jukebox.

The entire thing worked well for a semester, until some killjoy updated the phone system default to disable voicemail for unused numbers and blew away all our songs.

[laborcontract]

Oh my God, I remember doing this to my friends. The default voicemail password always worked so I reset their voice messages to strange sounds or me doing voices.

It’s amazing how insecure everything was. I remember as a kid walking around with a cordless phone realizing you can pick up other peoples’ conversations.

There was something so charming about technology back in the day. I don't think it's purely nostalgia. I think part of it was that our lives didn’t revolve around it so poking around never really hurt.

[stavros]

I really hate this. Who were the songs hurting? Nobody, someone just decided to make the world a little bit worse because it wasn't "proper".

[karmelapple]

Did anyone use the Red Talking Phonebook in the 1990s?

It had a phone number you could dial and then you could enter codes to get different information such as movie times, jokes, the time of day, and so on.

I liked trying random codes in it to see if I could find hidden services... and eventually I did. I don't recall the exact code, but I think it was like 9987. It turned out to be basically this - an anonymous public voicemail box where you could listen to recordings other people made, and you could make your own.

A few other people stumbled upon it, too, and there was a range of messages on there: some funny, some very silly, some fairly scary or weird.

I've never come across anyone else who had stumbled upon this though... surely someone here has?

[b112]

Closest thing to this, was a number a friend of mine was told about. We called it, and you could hear 100s of people talking, some sort of crossed analog line issue. This was in the 80s in a very rural area.

Anyhow I remember everyone having fun, yelling at everyone else to be heard, but also, a few people really mad. It seemed like some people wanted to make a phone call, everyone else was just having fun.

A few days later it vanished, probably to the happiness of those lines directly affected.

[enobrev]

This reminds me of the 90s - but not just from the looks.

There was a time in the mid 90s in Chicago ( maybe most cities? ) when pagers were the thing, and a pager would come with a free voicemail box. The pager companies would set the voicemail pin to the last 4 digits of the pager number. The customer was meant to change it when they first signed up for their account.

And so I knew quite a few people who would test numbers all day and night to steal voicemail numbers and then use them for all sorts of things.

Promoting raves and other parties

Party lines

Message boards

Various things involving graffiti.

It was a normal thing back then to find a local pay phone and call a couple known voicemail boxes for figure out what to do that weekend or to see where friends were going to be.

[tr90814]

Super cool - reminds me a bit of The Secrets Hotline

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-secrets-hotline/id...

[3-cheese-sundae]

What audio codec and parameters are used for the recordings? You've really nailed the 90s landline sound.

[ryukoposting]

You could probably just apply a 300Hz-3300Hz band-pass filter to any given recording and make it sound really close to analog phone call audio [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Ch...

[jcrawfordor]

audio coming right off the TDM phone network will be 8-bit samples, 8 kHz sampling rate, companded. Doing anything else requires direct IP peering (e.g. with a cellular carrier) which is out of reach of your typical inexpensive VoIP trunking provider.

[unixispower]

They come from my VoIP provider as 16bit 8kHz WAV files. I crunch them down to MP3s using ffmpeg before uploading. I don't get any say in the source quality, but I'm quite pleased with it as well.

[spxneo]

the voicemails are genuinely wholesome and theme of the 90s, i cracked up at the hot pockets one

some more details about stack and implementation would be great too curious how this was built

[unixispower]

Site is static built using Jekyll. Voicemail inbox is hosted using VoIP.ms. I pull the voicemails manually by running a Python script, edit the Markdown file that the script spits out to add a memo, then run another script to build and upload the site to Neocities.

I thought about making a dedicated "app" for all of it, but why make it more complicated than it has to be. I manually moderate all the calls anyway, so I just stuck with a simple smattering of scripts and static hosting.

You can see all the site source and scripts here: https://gitlab.com/unixispower/after-the-beep

[tossit444]

There's a different person that also has this kind of project going on, it's pretty cool to see people do this more.

https://linktr.ee/at_the_beep

[nico]

Really cool, thank you for posting

Are you using something like asterisk or FreeSWITCH to connect to the siptrunk? If so, do you have a backend for the dialplan?

Would love to see the code if possible

[unixispower]

For fun I self-host Asterisk at home, but I'm using a cheap VoIP provider (VoIP.ms) to take the burden of hosting for this project. The code that I did write to pull messages is just some boring API interfacing in a simple Python script: https://gitlab.com/unixispower/after-the-beep/-/blob/main/_u...

[BuildTheRobots]

> If so, do you have a backend for the dialplan?

not wanting to take away from the ops work, but on FreeSwitch you could do the SIP side of this with the default config and a free or cheap sip provider. As default it'll provide voicemail services to offline phones, so if you add your sip provider and direct all incoming calls to (eg) extension 1000 but never connect a sip handset to that extension, everyone gets sent to voicemail and you end up with a folder of wav files. What you then do with the front end is beyond me, though at home I just have apache serving an index of that directory.

If the SIP side of it is the mystery and you're interested in it, I'd really recommend installing Asterisk or FreeSwitch and having a play. You'll be stuck writing weird INI files or XML for config and there's a lot of new terminology, but it can be cheap and fun to play with. And a terminally deep rabbit hole if you actually want to fall down it.

Personally, the only reason I still run my pbx (aside from something to faff with, and a platform for testing silliness) is the fact I can easily record phone calls. Most of the time it's only because I have a bad memory and take useless notes, but there doesn't seem to be a single modern mobile phone on market that allows me to record both sides of the audio when making a voice call.

[lobito14]

Left a msg several hours ago, but it's not showing on website. What am I missing?

[unixispower]

The site is manually moderated. I made the mistake of posting it over my lunch break and had to go back to work which caused a significant delay. I'm back on processing things now.

[layman51]

It seems to be manually moderated by one person so it might take a while.

[trevcanhuman]

He just updated the website.

[mariorojas]

I've tried to dial from Mexico and it seems like the phone is not available.

I'm dialing [phone]

[trevcanhuman]

It worked for me just as you dialed! My carrier is Telcel.

[mariorojas]

it seems like it's working again, thanks everyone for taking a look

[kxrm]

you'll need to dial international.

I believe the exit code is 00 for Mexico so dial

00 1 442 667 2337

[shazz8bits]

What a great idea! Just of curiosity, how much does it cost per month with voip.ms? Looks like a bunch of little costs per month but I could not figure out the total…

[unixispower]

I don't really know yet. My provider charges by the minute, so it's heavily dependent on usage. I'd imagine the post to HN will cause a nice spike on my bill though lol

[ParetoOptimal]

Collecting voice data to create train AI to speak in?

[unixispower]

Nope, just collecting them to listen to :)

[tudorw]

They Might Be Giants flash backs to Dial-A-Song.

[mycall]

NCN has a great show called Voice Jail [0] that includes a huge collection of comedic audio cutups on this topic.

[0] https://nationalcynical.bandcamp.com/album/midnight-voicejai...

[achristmascarl]

the retro windows gui is such a perfect match for this. amazing work!

[nlunbeck]

The talking Minesweeper smiley is really the icing on the cake, love it!

[vmfunction]

Remind me of http://cel.ly, where sms is available online. Looks like they are not operational anymore.

[DigiEggz]

Incredible and nostalgic. Excellent project!

[nirvael]

Longmont Potion Castle vibes

[bossyTeacher]

I was hoping that we would be able to post a voice message :(

[gigatree]

You leave a message by calling the number at the top of the page

[unixispower]

Was there an issue with the inbox? I check them manually, so it takes me a bit to publish them

[anjc]

Great idea. Americans are so funny.

[rrr_oh_man]

Bug: Menu doesn’t work with Skype

(I love the design!)

[rhaps0dy]

This should be a bug in Skype if anything, it should conform to normal phone interfaces.

I've had the same problem in the past. I think you're likely using Skype on iOS and typing numbers for the menu on the iOS phone virtual keyboard. Instead, you should do it in the Skype app -- the phone menu ones don't work.

[i4k]

Is this time ever coming back?

[swyx]

how is the last message march 31? does this thing update live?

[unixispower]

I manually moderate the voicemails and run a script locally to build out a static site and upload it to Neocities. The site is relatively fresh (created within the past year); it just hasn't seen much traffic yet.

[function_seven]

Are you waiting for news on your colon? Refresh. Jacob just left you a message a few minutes after you posted this comment.

[kocyigityunus]

great design. loved it.

[xyst]

lol, it's all dudes.

[worddepress]

I am not sure about "I'm a real boy!"

[ycombinatrix]

what's the relevancy? this isn't a dating app