Easier to keep track of us all on one centralized social media site like Facebook or Twitter than on a million BBSes all exchanging users, information, and ideas. 

Right. That is precisely why I have quit the big blue F.

Moving right along: My work in progress is https://www.smashbot.com

WHICH happens to be my de-centralized corner of the internet. Good thing the internet has lots of corners, like a mandelbrot fractal.

Here's what I have and what I am trying to get to...
Currently, it is all tied together with phpBB. I am working on removing phpBB and using Citadel to tie everything together but first I must learn how to do that.

My goal is to have within the Citadel, a few, but not dozens of forums with active user engagement and participation. Also found within is a pretty feature-rich interet chat room. I will attempt to re-skin the Citadel to resemble C-Base 64 BBS on a Commodore 64. I have all of this working on phpBB right now except the Commodore 64 look and feel. When I figure out the coding to a strong enough degree, I plan to move it all back to Citadel.

Fri Apr 02 2021 08:17:40 MST from "ParanoidDelusions" <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Easier to keep track of us all on one centralized social media site like Facebook or Twitter than on a million BBSes all exchanging users, information, and ideas. 

 

The hilarious thing is all of their persecution of us was based on the idea that they felt that *our* bullying was driving people from their platform and censoring opposing voices. 

To stop people from bullying and harassing people into being silenced... 

They've bullied and harassed people into silence. 

Fri Apr 02 2021 11:43:43 MST from "smashbot64" <smashbot64@secure.wallofhate.com>

Right. That is precisely why I have quit the big blue F.

Moving right along: My work in progress is https://www.smashbot.com

WHICH happens to be my de-centralized corner of the internet. Good thing the internet has lots of corners, like a mandelbrot fractal.

Here's what I have and what I am trying to get to...
Currently, it is all tied together with phpBB. I am working on removing phpBB and using Citadel to tie everything together but first I must learn how to do that.

My goal is to have within the Citadel, a few, but not dozens of forums with active user engagement and participation. Also found within is a pretty feature-rich interet chat room. I will attempt to re-skin the Citadel to resemble C-Base 64 BBS on a Commodore 64. I have all of this working on phpBB right now except the Commodore 64 look and feel. When I figure out the coding to a strong enough degree, I plan to move it all back to Citadel.

Fri Apr 02 2021 08:17:40 MST from "ParanoidDelusions" <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Easier to keep track of us all on one centralized social media site like Facebook or Twitter than on a million BBSes all exchanging users, information, and ideas. 

 

 

So, I love the layout and look of your BBS. The trouble I find with that particular kind of forum is - it is hard to pick up where you left off and nurture ongoing discussions. That is why I love Citadel. C=64 BBSes were awesome for trading warez - but not the best format for conversations. Citadel is a much more conversation-driven format. 

Fri Apr 02 2021 11:43:43 MST from "smashbot64" <smashbot64@secure.wallofhate.com>

Right. That is precisely why I have quit the big blue F.

Moving right along: My work in progress is https://www.smashbot.com

WHICH happens to be my de-centralized corner of the internet. Good thing the internet has lots of corners, like a mandelbrot fractal.

Here's what I have and what I am trying to get to...
Currently, it is all tied together with phpBB. I am working on removing phpBB and using Citadel to tie everything together but first I must learn how to do that.

My goal is to have within the Citadel, a few, but not dozens of forums with active user engagement and participation. Also found within is a pretty feature-rich interet chat room. I will attempt to re-skin the Citadel to resemble C-Base 64 BBS on a Commodore 64. I have all of this working on phpBB right now except the Commodore 64 look and feel. When I figure out the coding to a strong enough degree, I plan to move it all back to Citadel.

Fri Apr 02 2021 08:17:40 MST from "ParanoidDelusions" <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Easier to keep track of us all on one centralized social media site like Facebook or Twitter than on a million BBSes all exchanging users, information, and ideas. 

 

 

Wait... I may have figured it out. 

I wasn't logged in. :D 

Sat Apr 03 2021 08:39:14 MST from "ParanoidDelusions" <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

So, I love the layout and look of your BBS. The trouble I find with that particular kind of forum is - it is hard to pick up where you left off and nurture ongoing discussions. That is why I love Citadel. C=64 BBSes were awesome for trading warez - but not the best format for conversations. Citadel is a much more conversation-driven format. 

 

Fri Apr 02 2021 11:43:43 MST from "smashbot64" <smashbot64@secure.wallofhate.com>

Right. That is precisely why I have quit the big blue F.

Moving right along: My work in progress is https://www.smashbot.com

WHICH happens to be my de-centralized corner of the internet. Good thing the internet has lots of corners, like a mandelbrot fractal.

Here's what I have and what I am trying to get to...
Currently, it is all tied together with phpBB. I am working on removing phpBB and using Citadel to tie everything together but first I must learn how to do that.

My goal is to have within the Citadel, a few, but not dozens of forums with active user engagement and participation. Also found within is a pretty feature-rich interet chat room. I will attempt to re-skin the Citadel to resemble C-Base 64 BBS on a Commodore 64. I have all of this working on phpBB right now except the Commodore 64 look and feel. When I figure out the coding to a strong enough degree, I plan to move it all back to Citadel.

Fri Apr 02 2021 08:17:40 MST from "ParanoidDelusions" <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Easier to keep track of us all on one centralized social media site like Facebook or Twitter than on a million BBSes all exchanging users, information, and ideas. 

 

 

 

sometimes i am a little dense at identifying sarcasm. Sarcastic or not, I know that my efforts are a peashooter against a goliath with the indie bbs model vs Fecesbook solution. I do know that without original content, no matter how demure or mundane (or downright ridiculous), Fecesbook would fail. I am only one person and the withdrawal of my input from their system just removes my thoughts and ideas from the chasm. HOWEVER, I still have the thoughts and ideas, and I'm sure others do, from all the years of running a BBS. Here are some truths:

It's not about a cable tv provider being better than a satellite provider, or better than a streaming "provider", 
the product people are seeking is the CONTENT. The programming. The transport does not matter. No one cares if their daughter watched frozen on Dish or Spectrum or Time Warner or Optimum or Amazon Prime or DirecTV, they only care if the kid got to see the movie. Who cares how it got there.

It's not about the message board software or the social media platform that is the transport that ideas are exchanged,  it is the messages and ideas and rants and ruminations that come from the human input, the ant farm that is being cultivated to generate original CONTENT for these networks like Fecesbook. 

I will do my part that makes me happier. I will still spew my own content onto the web 20 goto 10, but I will 
provide the venue. My friends and foes can use it too. The only content that will be harvested will be by smarter bots, and even they have to take what we say out of context, because, thats what they do. They pass butter.

ParnoidDelusions.... my memory in my own brain is worse off than non-ecc or mfm formatted floppies. 

Were you a bbs user on The Valley (c64 thing)? For some reason I remember seeing sAnAtArIuM or something similar in the userlog, but the last i ran it on telnet was 2016 or so when my ex wife smashed my commodore hardware because she is satans little sister and that's another story, but are you the same person?

No sarcasm here. You sound a lot like me. I call publishing content on Hatebook "Feeding the monster," and I believe that is exactly what it is. When I quit, they *begged* me to come back in e-mail - and since then, I've been abusive as FUCK to them when I do go back, and dared them to give me a lifetime ban, and tagged them, and they just whistled and looked at their shoes. 

Because they see how much traffic I generate - how many clicks happen when I'm on - and they understand the economic impact of just THAT loss - let alone thousands of us, or millions, or hundreds of millions. And this is how we get a mass exodus going - alone, we're insignificant - but their algorithm understands what happens if we start pulling away our content and their users start following us. It is like the Pied Piper. And they've seen it happen before - to Myspace. To Digg. 

Facebook is not too big to fail. That is why they've banned my URL - first as a hate site, then when I bitched about it to Ted Cruz, as "spam". 

Tue Apr 06 2021 19:51:24 MST from "smashbot64" <smashbot64@secure.wallofhate.com>

sometimes i am a little dense at identifying sarcasm. Sarcastic or not, I know that my efforts are a peashooter against a goliath with the indie bbs model vs Fecesbook solution. I do know that without original content, no matter how demure or mundane (or downright ridiculous), Fecesbook would fail. I am only one person and the withdrawal of my input from their system just removes my thoughts and ideas from the chasm. HOWEVER, I still have the thoughts and ideas, and I'm sure others do, from all the years of running a BBS. Here are some truths:

It's not about a cable tv provider being better than a satellite provider, or better than a streaming "provider", 
the product people are seeking is the CONTENT. The programming. The transport does not matter. No one cares if their daughter watched frozen on Dish or Spectrum or Time Warner or Optimum or Amazon Prime or DirecTV, they only care if the kid got to see the movie. Who cares how it got there.

It's not about the message board software or the social media platform that is the transport that ideas are exchanged,  it is the messages and ideas and rants and ruminations that come from the human input, the ant farm that is being cultivated to generate original CONTENT for these networks like Fecesbook. 

I will do my part that makes me happier. I will still spew my own content onto the web 20 goto 10, but I will 
provide the venue. My friends and foes can use it too. The only content that will be harvested will be by smarter bots, and even they have to take what we say out of context, because, thats what they do. They pass butter.

 

It is possible. The original The Sanitarium BBS was also called The Amiga Archives. It was a 916 (Sacramento) BBS. I went by Metallica, Paranoid Delusions, The Walkin' Dude and Flexible Moralities. The Valley does sound familiar. But, I generally only leeched on Commodore boards. The message forums on Menu drive C-64 BBSes drove me nuts compared to Citadel. They were awkward to navigate and full of teh W@r3z D00Dz! 

Tue Apr 06 2021 20:00:41 MST from "smashbot64" <smashbot64@secure.wallofhate.com>

ParnoidDelusions.... my memory in my own brain is worse off than non-ecc or mfm formatted floppies. 

Were you a bbs user on The Valley (c64 thing)? For some reason I remember seeing sAnAtArIuM or something similar in the userlog, but the last i ran it on telnet was 2016 or so when my ex wife smashed my commodore hardware because she is satans little sister and that's another story, but are you the same person?

 

 

I spent a solid afternoon looking for a way to become an official holon (see previous post) and apparently the only attempt anyone has made at establishing this system visible to the public was at a hacker convention a few years back. Fair enough, the book Freedom(TM) had hackers as the original creators.

Blogging was a web-based BBS system for a while, sort of. People would login to each other's blogs on WordPress or Blogger and post and chat and such. But it was post-centric as opposed to subject room-centric. WordPress has a framework to combine the experiences or at least run them side by side. Forum systems and things like that. But anything open to the web is going to botted for link farming, which makes Citadel a better closed system if you don't to hire an admin. The Barrett Firearms forums were a treasure trove of information but got hijacked by Russian spammers selling drugs and brides. It was tragic. They nuked them from orbit instead of letting me fix them when I was their SEO contractor. :(

Anyway, I think I'm going to start a blog for public exposure with an attached BBS for the more dedicated members. That's probably the best way to hybridize the potential of both systems for what I'm trying to accomplish here.

I want people to be able to visit me in VR on my website using bleeding edge technology that I think is just a few months away. I just can't manage to believe it's not possible. Getting a camera array pointed at my face with a stitching algorithm that live-updates a 3D model for live-streaming. I could be the VR real estate agent for all the retirees on the other side of the Puget Sound. 

I wrote several long replies - and each time I saved, it said it wouldn't post an empty message. 

Not sure what is going on with Citadel - but there are some bugs in the chickenscratch, at the moment. 

A blog/BBS combo is a great way to go. 

The VR website with a virtual Wangiss Headroom is probably do-able right now. It would be expensive, and there aren't enough users out there to make it practical. But... someone has to be the loss-leader on this trailblazing path! :D 

The Samsung Gear VR glass had a virtual community - one of the apps, you could walk around a big empty area and just draw 3D art that floated in the air. It was surreal and absolutely fantastic. It reminded me a LOT of being on early BBSes in the 80s. For some reason - it isn't catching on though. I think people are too stupid now to appreciate how incredible the concept is. That is - now that everyone is on technology - the technology caters to the lowest common denominators. Back in the 70s and 80s, it had to appeal to the most forward thinking. 

The most forward thinking still have DREAMS, and they're the ones inventing the stuff - but they have to dumb it down now - because the average target demographic is a mouth-breather. It'll fail if you target it at the technological sophistication of a traditional user. 

Wed Apr 07 2021 19:26:51 MSTfrom "Wangiss" <wangiss@wallofhate.com>

I spent a solid afternoon looking for a way to become an official holon (see previous post) and apparently the only attempt anyone has made at establishing this system visible to the public was at a hacker convention a few years back. Fair enough, the book Freedom(TM) had hackers as the original creators.

Blogging was a web-based BBS system for a while, sort of. People would login to each other's blogs on WordPress or Blogger and post and chat and such. But it was post-centric as opposed to subject room-centric. WordPress has a framework to combine the experiences or at least run them side by side. Forum systems and things like that. But anything open to the web is going to botted for link farming, which makes Citadel a better closed system if you don't to hire an admin. The Barrett Firearms forums were a treasure trove of information but got hijacked by Russian spammers selling drugs and brides. It was tragic. They nuked them from orbit instead of letting me fix them when I was their SEO contractor. :(

Anyway, I think I'm going to start a blog for public exposure with an attached BBS for the more dedicated members. That's probably the best way to hybridize the potential of both systems for what I'm trying to accomplish here.

I want people to be able to visit me in VR on my website using bleeding edge technology that I think is just a few months away. I just can't manage to believe it's not possible. Getting a camera array pointed at my face with a stitching algorithm that live-updates a 3D model for live-streaming. I could be the VR real estate agent for all the retirees on the other side of the Puget Sound. 

Building this new computer is really inspiring me. I feel like running another computer I can SSH into from a beefy one is going to be very empowering and magical for BBSing. Having a headless Pi sitting there accepting visitors from across the galaxy will be fantastic. Only thing that worries me is, as I mentioned above, holon communities are hacker territory. I'm not at all convinced that I can hack-proof a Pi or my home network it's connected to if I'm deliberately inviting people of colorful backgrounds.

Wangiss I did just that. I hosted a commodore 64 bbs via telnet on my home internet service. Here was the setup:

Raspberry Pi running rasbian jesse. TCPSER by Jim Brain to manage incoming telnet. Usb cord from raspi to a turbo232 interface. Cbase bbs running on a real commodore 64.

The issues did not come from aimable retro folks wanting to nostalgize and connect to an old sk00L L33t commie BBs with w@rez and whatnot...the problems came from

Asia
Eurpoe
The Levantine Peninsula
Africa

Since I did this via my home internet on port 23, the bbs service would chronically get "stuck" by a bot or a script throwing known vulnerabilities at a primitive machine. No exploit worked of course but all the attention to the port tied up the resource. Then I got smarter and moved the BBS to port 6400 (maybe 6464, dont remember, might have even been telnet on port 6502)

Thats when things got worse. Once scanners found telnet on a higher numbered port, they were chronically HAMMERING my home internet connection with port knock attempts, brute force stuff you name it. It was like they thought I had a high value target with all HR records to exploit. This actually screwed up things for me because there were so many attempts on my IP that my isp complained to me, they thought I was P2P movies. Comcast/Xfinity SANDVINE needs some more real world scenarios before they accuse hobbyists but that is another story. 

My ex wife shortly after that broke most of my computer stuff in a violent fashion. 

Ok without going down the rabbit hole what I am getting to is I now use a cloud host as the front line of defense.  There are many out there, some of the big players are Amazon, Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, Linode, Vultr. 

Of those I have tested AWS digital ocean, linode and vutr.

AWS: TONS of options. Once off the "free tier"  it can get costly quick

Digital Ocean: stable, but felt more red hat/fedora/centos oriented to me. I am a debian guy. 

Linode and Vultr are about the same, but I am partial to Linode. They have a HUGE educational support library. Linode has what I feel to be a formidible online university. Both Linode and Vultr use KVM for Virtualization. The prices are cheap. Like $10 gets you a very nice virtual machine.

Anhyow, I am not an alcoholic, I am a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings, drunks go to parties. Even parties of one. Sorry that was a thought meant for another room. Anyway. my advice is to expose

a virtual machine  to the filthy sewer that is the public internet to an instance running your chosen distro FIRST. Filter stuff with pfsense or whatever THEN tunnel stuff to your raspi. Or better yet, offer all your web facing content on your VPS host. 

somehow I feel ascii express was a commodore bbs or a commodore bbs user or something like that but by the end of this post I will remember why I remember ascii express. Maybe I will remember two days before the day after tomorrow. 

1. Take back the internet. 

2. We invented this whole expressing yourself online shit, F you Fckbook. 

I am steering www.smashbot.com that direction. Here is what I posted on uncensored. I may have asked this before, if so, OH SO FCKING SORRY YOU HAD TO WASTE SYNAPSES 

(lol)

Is anyone interested in explaining to a dangerous idiot (me) what would be involved with causing citadel register/authenticate its users via phpBB's mariaDB? I see that citadel uses BerkleyDB by default. My website is held together by phpBB (I know, blasphemy and treason, but hear me out) which really only is in place to authenticate users and duct tape things together.

My site is focused on the following:

1. Analog Telephone Switching
2. Commodore computers
3. Internet chat rooms (kindasorta like chaturbate but without the p0rn)

https://www.smashbot.com

This isn't an ad for my site, but my mildly autistic self is having trouble explaining where I am trying to get to with this. Maybe if someone looked at what I have done so far they would say "ah, i get it". Not likely but one can hope.

So, in a nutshell... the way I have used phpBB holds 2 things together: the first is the entry point to the chat rooms app (working), and also the entry
point to the citadel (citadel.smashbot.com) where the rooms and levels and email and all the other goodyness and ungodliness will live. Right now I have a few scattered "forums" on phpBB being populated mostly by RSS. I want to move those into the citadel. Thus my phpBB instance would have two offerings: the internet chatroom, and citadel.

The whole point is I am trying to offer single sign on. Once a user registers on my website handled by phpBB, the auth works on the citadel so as not to inconvenience and confuse people by an additional registration like user and password. I think I could make phpBB and citadel do LDAP somehow, but I would have to teach myself LDAP and phpBB auth via LDAP, and citadel auth via LDAP,  but my chat room app does not speak LDAP.  

I may have a vague recollection of asking this question before. Maybe that wasn't me. My apologies if my disability is causing deja vu, because as I typed this out it's still vu ja de to me.

I remember now, ascii express is another ham. I was never licensed but I could probably pass the amateur extra class license test because of my extensive love of radios. My fave right now is this cheap baofeng but holy crap its output is tight. Almost as good as my icom 2sat

I should get off my ass and take at least the tech ticket online. Tell me if there is a V-E running an online licensing session thru this covid crap

I remember why I remember you... ddial. West Philly to Conshohocken. Savage Frontier. Now I am positive we both know sybill.lync very well. Hello old friend. It is hillarious  how small earth is.

fin Cow says hi.

my bad... sybill.linq

Great conversation in this room. Nothing all week, then a flood I can't keep up with on a Wednesday night. 

I've been trying to get through the BBS since last night - lots of things backing up before this weekend trip that I won't get a chance to get around to until Monday evening. 

Keep the conversation flowing, though.