Pretty sure I'm more of an antagonistic, confrontational dick who speaks his mind bluntly - after a day of drinking by the pool. 

This *could* be a problem. 

I agree about the Professor Trump thing, but it would be Pagan Flames (Ollinger) who would be doing it, like he spoofed my Justin Case handle with his Justin Tune. I'm no longer in touch with him or Black Guardian, but they were two of the top attractions of the Dragon's Den, along with Little Alice, who disappeared after the parent of an underage user who she left an x-rated message to threatened to sue everyone involved with my BBS. I lost nearly half of my user base after that!

That was supposed to be Justin Tyme, not Justin Tune! Spell wrecker!

James Ollinger is still around - he has been invited to the BBS. From what I understand, he wants nothing to do with Citadel and has become even more of a recluse than he was in the past. A very narrow range of people he still communicates with. 

It probably isn't a bad strategy. There is a certain element of risk to ruining the nostalgia of the past trying to relive it with those same people, today. 

But you're right - he would be the one running with it, if he were around. 

Justin Tune is *hilarious*, too. He had a gift for that kind of thing. I do miss reading his content. 

Was Little Alice actually a female? Did she know that the user was underage? Was she just trying to be shocking - or was she soliciting in her correspondence to the user? 

It sounds traumatic - and is certainly one of the big risks of running a public accessible service. I mean - Brenda Daniels did threaten to shove a Louiseville slugger up my ass *sideways* when I was still underage - and I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I'm pretty sure Wallaby was trying to cultivate me to recruit young female modem users into a swingers harem before I had turned 18. I think the thing is that I was already experienced enough to be able to handle those kind of things without bringing Mom and Dad into the situation - and I feel like most of the Metallica Cit Brat Pack were kind of on the same level. Lower case michelle wasn't really part of our circle - but she went on to be a stripper and a porn star. I took Patrick Emory (the local news anchor) out to wine and dine him one evening for The Byte Brokers, and he wanted to go to City Limits - the strip club. At the end, they do a revue with all the girls dancing in front of the stages - and lo and behold - I went, "I think I know one of those girls," and Patrick was like, "Go up and ask her..." and I couldn't really explain how awkward it would be to go up to a fully nude stripper at a club and go, "Excuse me, do I know you from the modem scene?" 

But... it would have worked, because it was her. She found out about it through friends, and showed up in full stripper uniform at the Byte Brokers a week or so later - and Ian Justman came back, white as a ghost, going, "There is a young lady up front to see you!" Heh. Point is, I'm sure michelle was getting inappropriate solicitations on the BBS all the time back then - and for all we know, she may have taken some of them up on it - but there was never any splashback onto any BBS for anything that happened like that - at least not within our group of already damaged Citadel adolescents. :) 

BG had faded out already and was an infrequent caller by the time I started dialing in. 

Sun May 02 2021 07:37:47 MST from Jerry Moore

I agree about the Professor Trump thing, but it would be Pagan Flames (Ollinger) who would be doing it, like he spoofed my Justin Case handle with his Justin Tune. I'm no longer in touch with him or Black Guardian, but they were two of the top attractions of the Dragon's Den, along with Little Alice, who disappeared after the parent of an underage user who she left an x-rated message to threatened to sue everyone involved with my BBS. I lost nearly half of my user base after that!

Actually ISP downtime today. First time I can remember I've had to call Cox with a connectivity issue. 

They tried to upgrade me to gigabit, and were really pushing me for a new modem/router. $8 a month for 12 months... 

But, I only need 5mb for you guys - and I don't feel like reconfiguring a whole new router. The guy said the modem has to be docsis 3.2 - but I'm pretty sure my modem/router *is* Docsis 3.2 compatible. So, it seemed like they REALLY wanted to swap out the router I have with the one they want me to have. 

I felt like this is like most "this is great and you've got to have it!" upgrades that are coming out of corporate America these days... 

"It is great for US, because it gives us MORE control over you - and we throw in some features to sweeten the deal, and make the price hard to pass up - but really - you're getting fucked in the end." 

So... I passed. 200mb is plenty fast enough for our needs at present. 

So, the thing to keep in mind if the BBS isn't there when you try and connect - it is almost certainly a temporary ISP outage. I've gone from flying with no redundancy on a Pi 3B+ to having two 1TB i5 NUCs in a VM "cluster" with multiple images of the BBS either running or able to be brought up running in seconds. If there is an outage of any kind short of my house being gone - we'll be back up and running shortly. Even if it is down for a day because of some sort of ISP issue - it'll be back as soon as they restore service. 


We're not going anywhere, at this point. You'll all quit calling before I take it down. It is pretty much flying itself. 

I'll keep that in mind if I can't seem to connect. I'm eager to get back home and play with my new tablet. Current ETA IS is the twelfth. I am scheduled to get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine on the eleventh. We'll see how that works out. One in a million chance of a blood clot! Considering the number of blood thinners I'm on, I'm not worried.

Have you talked to your doctors about why the Johnson and Johnson instead of Pfizer? 

Is it a matter of speed and them wanting you to just have to do one dose? It seems like there should be a discussion about taking the two dose Pfizer and just socially isolating for the two weeks in between. 

Sun May 02 2021 21:40:50 MST from Jerry Moore

I'll keep that in mind if I can't seem to connect. I'm eager to get back home and play with my new tablet. Current ETA IS is the twelfth. I am scheduled to get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine on the eleventh. We'll see how that works out. One in a million chance of a blood clot! Considering the number of blood thinners I'm on, I'm not worried.

I have no idea who or what lil Alice was - just a handle on my BBS that helped keep the place interesting, along with Pagan Flames and Black Guardian. When things slowed down I would start an argument between Jerry Moore and Justin Case, then quietly slip out when I had several other people join in. We survived the Lil Alice debacle

(continuing), and that wasn't as bad as the one where a new user who I had given Aide Status to started to sabotage the place because he apparently got mad about something. I was able to fix his initial attack, since I was watching as it happened. I had a recent backup of the message base, and I just took the board down and copied it over the current one. I removed his account, but he logged in under a different name and started leaving messages that were long strings of garbage interlaced with profanity. I made a LOT of backups rewrote the message base every time he tried this. I was running the board from home, after we'd closed the store forever, so I had a lot of time. He wanted to get the entire message base to fill up with garbage and scroll off the meaningful messages. He eventually gave up or calmed down and disappeared.

Oh, as far as Ollinger is concerned, I don't blame him a bit. When my marriage blew up, I gave him the Dragon's Den BBS computer and all my backup discs for safekeeping. My wife and her thug friends showed up at his front door and demanded the computer and anything that had come with it. He was terrified, and gave them everything. He still doesn't want to talk to me. I taught him Computer Bulletin Boards were dangerous.

Yeah... never give your BBS to a Pagan Flames when you've got a Metallica who was constantly getting into online altercations to hold it for safe keeping. 

Your wife and her thug friends would have gotten fed their teeth at my place. Then I would have called the cops on them. 

That one dude who ended up driving around town threatening to blow himself up... I got into it with him at a MUPT, and I brought a friend for that... we ran... smartly - because that guy was 

A: Huge
B: Crazy

But the friend I brought ended up doing 5 years in Folsom for aggravated assault with intent to do great bodily harm - which is basically the charge you get when you beat someone to Reginald Denny level. 

And he *wasn't* my friend involved in organized crime. 

I have heard about Lil Alice - but I didn't know it was just a one-off account that no one knew who it was - I always thought it was a regular who flamed out before I got there. 

Mon May 03 2021 14:58:48 MST from Jerry Moore

Oh, as far as Ollinger is concerned, I don't blame him a bit. When my marriage blew up, I gave him the Dragon's Den BBS computer and all my backup discs for safekeeping. My wife and her thug friends showed up at his front door and demanded the computer and anything that had come with it. He was terrified, and gave them everything. He still doesn't want to talk to me. I taught him Computer Bulletin Boards were dangerous.

As far as AIDE status abuse is concerned - that is a pretty brave thing to do in the BBS community. Anyone found out of destroying a person's board after being trusted with AIDE/Cosysop status would be shunned by basically the entire community at that time. Talk about I'm guessing this is before the MUPTs and we all had a degree of face-to-face accountability with one another. It sounds like the kind of stunt that happens on the Internet today, because people feel anonymous. 

Citadel was a very regional BBS. It was so radically different than the typical menu-driven, file transfer oriented BBS - that most people didn't "get" it. I hear a lot of people claim that the Bay Area online community, "The Well" was the precursor to the modern online forum. If that is so, Citadel was the precursor to The Well... and to Usenet. Really - the similarity between Citadel and Usenet is the strongest - because Citadel rooms are just "alt." subs. 

I was a big Usenet user when it first came out - because of the similarity. The difference is that Usenet was so big and you had to opt into rooms, and go to them specifically - where Citadel is the reverse, small and you have to opt OUT of topics/rooms if you aren't interested. It ends up exposing you to more rooms and causing more conversation. 

I've always felt that Menu driven BBSes primarily attract content consumers - while Citadel attracts content creators. It has to - because one person just writing to themselves hardly works on a traditional Citadel (though it could probably work with webcit). 

Tue May 04 2021 00:01:06 MST from ASCII Express

I've enjoyed reading these old Citadel stories. Oddly I ran a number of different BBS software packages, but only discovered Citadel towards the end. It had pockets of popularity.
Yes, people feel scared to speak. Bring back the BBS!

Wow! You're back! You must have had the board down. I was leaving a message telling you that I had directed a fellow FaceBook user who told me that he was in FaceBook jail for thirty days your way. His name is David Driscoll, and his girlfriend Elaine Herrick might also check you out. I hope you don't mind. He's not into retro games or older model computers, but I thought he might like the political atmosphere.

Yeah. I did some pretty aggressive repairs on the Citadel yesterday - and I was down for an extended period with a lot of bouncing as I did reboots and made checkpoints and snapshots. 

But the BBS is humming now. Only one lingering issue I haven't been able to nail down. The redirect to the bulletin/hello page at login. I'll probably test and try to fix that on Monday. 

But I honestly thought no one would notice, traffic has been so light here the last couple of weeks. 

So I'm a little touched that someone noticed. 

Now if we could get TheDave and Wangiss and Otto Roboto to start calling back in on a regular basis... 

We would have a pretty decent user base. 

Thu May 06 2021 06:44:50 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Yeah. I did some pretty aggressive repairs on the Citadel yesterday - and I was down for an extended period with a lot of bouncing as I did reboots and made checkpoints and snapshots. 

But the BBS is humming now. Only one lingering issue I haven't been able to nail down. The redirect to the bulletin/hello page at login. I'll probably test and try to fix that on Monday. 

 

But I do call in regularly.  I just have not been very vocal lately...

Thu May 06 2021 08:19:49 AM MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

But I honestly thought no one would notice, traffic has been so light here the last couple of weeks. 

So I'm a little touched that someone noticed. 

Now if we could get TheDave and Wangiss and Otto Roboto to start calling back in on a regular basis... 

We would have a pretty decent user base. 

 

Thu May 06 2021 06:44:50 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Yeah. I did some pretty aggressive repairs on the Citadel yesterday - and I was down for an extended period with a lot of bouncing as I did reboots and made checkpoints and snapshots. 

But the BBS is humming now. Only one lingering issue I haven't been able to nail down. The redirect to the bulletin/hello page at login. I'll probably test and try to fix that on Monday.