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Floppyshop 2
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1997-06-21
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ ~
~ SO YOU WANT TO BE A SYSOP? ~
~ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ~
~ by Wally Byczek ~
~ WallyWorld BBS 1989 ~
~ ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To start a BBS, you first need a computer. No matter what computer
you currently have, it won't be large enough or powerful enough for what
you intend to do. And since you can't take the board down (unless you run
a kiddy board that bounces up and down or runs only between the time
school lets out and Daddy comes home) to do your own work, you will need
another computer that you can ill afford. Next you have to find a BBS
software package. This can take months, or you can write your own if you
are so inclined. This can take years.
Next, unless you are starting a kiddy board, you will need a phone
line other than the one that you normally converse on. Depending on the
Telco's mood, personnel, and the imminence of a strike, this could be
done in as little as 2 weeks or it may never happen. Next, if you plan to
run doors on your board, you must now spend long distance dollars in
scouring other boards for evaluation and acquisition of these games.
Naturally, your external file protocols don't come with your BBS
software, so you have to again scour the countryside to find them.
Utilities for your BBS are also an afterthought and have to be obtained
in a similar fashion.
All of these external programs have to be registered after a while,
since most stop working after a while or have an annoying feature about
them until they are registered. All of the above items take money! and
plenty of it! While we are on the subject of money, you must obtain a
modem. Whatever modem you currently have will not be supported by the BBS
software. This is some sort of unwritten law pertaining to writing
communication software.
Be prepared to open your wallet wide. No, your old Hayes 300 won't
be good enough. People even hate 1200 baud these days, and the teenagers
seem to have USR HST's these days and will complain vociferously if they
can't access you at 14.4. Now you pick a name for your BBS. Whatever you
choose will be ridiculed by 20% of those who see it. Another 50% will
offer suggestions that are worse than the one you chose. The remaining
30% won't care.
Next comes the wonderful task of installing your board. You have
your machine. If you just bought it, that means formatting your hard
disk, installing DOS, and ASNI drivers and Lord knows what else that you
need for your board. If you already have the machine, you may as well go
ahead and reformat it anyway. Something will guarantee that you will have
to do this before you are done. The manual for the BBS software was most
likely written by the author's 10 year old and was mimeographed. It got
wet in the mail and smeared as well, so at least 30% of the manual will
be physically useless. The rest is just procedurally useless.
Next comes the fun task of deciding on your board structure. Who can
do what and when can they do it. You must design your menus and opening
screens.
You have to get a pretty good stock of files, because no one will
upload to you unless you have something there for them to take first.
(not that it matters, I suppose, since even if you DO have files, they
won't upload much anyway.)
Next comes the security aspect. You can leave your board wide open
so that users with the name of Benny Beanfart, Dr. Rape, Crack, Hack,
File Attack, DR DEATH, etc can come in and do anything they like. Or, you
can lock it up so tight that no one will call. There is no compromise on
this.
Next you must build events or prepare to live at your keyboard. A
BBS HAS to be backed up. If you can't afford a high density backup medium
such as tape or cartridge, you will spend many many hours per week
flipping floppies. Events are designed to allow the sysop the luxury of
having the board do routine tasks at odd hours by itself- Backups, purges
and so on. These never work as they come and will have to be extensively
modified by you. And since they generally only run at 3 AM, you will have
to be awake to see just how they die and then try to fix it.
Alright... the big day is here. Your board is ready, your modem is
ready, Telco finally hooked you up, and then you start up. This is when
after 2 days of no one calling, despite your ad in Computer Shopper and
having placed your number on every other BBS in existance, you discover
that the init strings for the modem are wrong. You discover this by
calling yourself from a friend's home. This takes calls to the author of
the software, the manufacturer of the modem and finally gets resolved by
asking another sysop how to do it.
Oh Boy! Now we're in business! During your first caller's visit,
someone will hit a telephone pole and you will lose power. Naturally,
since the board is new, you didn't back it up. The power surge when the
electricity was restored roached your hard disk. Go back to low level
formating...
Finally, you're up and working. After about a week of gleefully
seeing someone call, you will encounter Benny Beanfart or his ilk. He
will leave public posts (always in caps and terribly mis-spelled) about
what a really lousy board this is and that the sysop is a three eyed
twit. You automatically kill his account. But do you leave the message
for the world to see? hmmm... dilemma number 1. Killing Benny does no
good because he will be back with another account such as SYSOP SUX or
some such thing. Eventually he will tire of the game and go away, but he
has given ideas to 30 of his friends who will also visit you sometime in
the next week. Then you will be visited by the "smart kid" who can tell
you everything that's wrong with your machine, your software, etc. It
doesn't matter that he's calling you on a Timex Sinclair. He knows more
about your 386 than Intel.
By now, your name has spread around. Probably, if you are in
Worcester, the college kids have your name and number. If it is Spetember
or January you are in trouble. You will probably be bombarded with file
requests for commercial software. Some will assist you by uploading Lotus
123 ver 3 that has the copy-proofing removed. Whoever uploads this to you
will then call Lotus Development Corp and tell them that you have a
pirated version on your board (anonymously of course)
If you imposed an upload/download ratio such that users must upload
one file to get x numbers of files in return, then you will recieve 2K
text files from them. They will download 2Mb of Gif files in return. By
now, you are disappointed with your message bases. You perhaps have (if
you are fortunate) two or three users who post messages outside of
private mail. These three users are symbionts who, if one of their number
does not call for 2 weeks, will not post because they miss their friend.
Your message bases will starve. You set up many areas for messages, all
carefully listed by topic. No public post will ever go into the area that
it should be in. You will find a raunchy joke posted in the Bible topics
area, technical questions asked in the political opinion area, and a
message from one of Benny Beanfart's cronies in the technical section.
You will next encounter the user who can't do anything right. He will
make you feel terribly guilty that you are running this system that seems
to rudely exclude him from enjoying it, because he cannot master the
concept that M means Message, F means Files, D means download etc. He
DOES however know how to leave comments to the sysop. At first you will
be responsive to all the user complaints and will make a valiant effort
to obtain the special game that was requested as a door. You discover it
on a board in the Fiji Islands and the off peak call cost you 32 dollars
to download it. You find then that the game was written for a board other
than the BBS that you run. You search the countryside for a conversion
interface. You find one in Omaha. Add another 40 dollars in phone bills
from the search. You discover now that the game must be registered with
the author. This is another 69 dollars. You discovered this because after
the game was installed, you called from a friend's house to test it. You
find out that while the console looks wonderful while it is being run,
the user sees a screen that informs him that the sysop is a cheap bum who
didn't even bother to register this wonderful piece of software. Since
the sysop is such a creep, why do you call there? Naturally, you register
it so the annoyance screen goes away. After it has been on the board for
2 months you discover that only 1 person ever used it and he only went in
there once, dropped carrier and hung up the board because you later
discovered that this "wonderful" piece of software doesn't monitor
carrier. Do you now register Watchdog so this won't happen again or do
you just scrap the game?
The work load is getting heavy on the board. Wow! It takes at least
2 hours per day to stay up with things. Answering mail, hunting down
Benny Beanfart's latest account, changing screens, moving messages back
to the areas that they truly belong in, adding new things, paying Telco,
arguing with your spouse, etc. You decide that perhaps it's time to
enlist some help in the form of an assistant sysop. This is a mistake.
The assistant will pay little attention to the needs of the board, but
WILL experiment with things like remote drop to dos. hehehehe! I think
this needs little elaboration.
By now, you are conversant with the many user complaints. WHY aren't
you around to answer the sysop page at 2:45 AM? Why does your message
editor use A for abort instead of Q for quit? How come there aren't any
nice ANSI screens? How come these crummy ANSI screens slow down the
board? Why can't I stay online for 3 hours at a time? Why can't my C64
see your graphics.. It must be your crummy board! I never post messages
because no one else ever does! What do you mean you killed my upload of
Dbase IV? I did upload something a year ago.. so how come I can't
download more than 100 files now? How come my friend has access level 50
and I only have level 40? Boy.. do you have a bad attitude! I think the
Silicon Sarcophagus is 100 times better than this board! This is a free
country.. I can say ANYTHING I want in public messages. What are you..
Hitler or something? How come nobody ever sends me mail? I used a bit
editor on Procomm and now it won't work.. tell me how to fix it. That GIF
file I downloaded didn't run... this stinks... you really must be a lousy
sysop if you didn't check to see that it would work for me.
Then you will discover the wonders of sysop to user interactive
chat. You will find this to be a most opportune time to get things done.
Since the majority of users who will page you into chat type at about
.000001 baud, you can have a conversation with the user and get things
done like mowing the lawn, making a three course meal, and cleaning out
the garage before the user has stated his request. Generally, the chat
request was for something such as How do I get out of a file listing or
something similar that is well covered in the user manual that you have
both as a file for downloading and as a bulletin for online reading.
One admonition is to not get angry about carrier drop by the user.
Remember that the user is calling you through the telco. Chances are that
no matter how malicious or inept the user may be, the telco probably did
it anyway.
Next comes BBS software upgrade time! Such fun! You will find that
the author no longer supports your version. You have to upgrade. This
means once again opening your wallet. The new version will not have the
same reserved file names, nor will the file structures be the same. The
author generously supplies you with a conversion program. This program is
designed to assist you in making all the little changes needed to perform
the upgrade.
It will automatically convert your file names and structures. There
are two type of these programs. One that requires that you have 5Mb more
free space than you do, and the other that will abort half way through
the conversion because of a bad disk sector read and didn't have a
corresponding error trap. Of the two, the latter is the more
catastrophic, because now your data can't be read by either version of
the software.
Since you successfully upgraded your software, you now discover what
the word Beta Site really means..
Now since you've done so well to this point, it's time for the
hardware to find something to compensate for all this good effort.
Generally, the hard drive controller is the most likely device to make
this decision to fail. It will not however abruptly die. It will instead,
gradually mis-write to disk over a period of several days before deciding
not to work at all anymore. This has the advantage that your last backups
will be no good at all once you replace the controller and reformat the
drive. hehehe!
Still want to be a sysop?
~~~~~eof~~~~~