ACPS5589@RYERSON.BITNET (GEORGE BORGES) (09/23/86)
(Sorry if this already got thru but I doubt it ... so here I go again.) Hi there. I have decided (after much mental debate and anguish) on a thesis topic to complete my degree. Seeing as there is an incredible void in the area of GOOD ST BBS programs, I have made that my goal. What I desperately require of my fellow net-atarians are original and/or good ideas/features that I could implement into the BBS. Any worthwhile suggestion will be considered and, since I will be releasing the program into the public domain, the more replies I receive, the potentially better product you as a user will receive (for free even). I have several ideas kicking around including (but not limited to) kermit, x+ymodem, FidoNet compatible, VT52/100 fullscreen editor for callers, and so on. It will be written mainly in Modula-2. Thx again for any help, George. BTW the tentative title is OPUS. If anyone can come up with anything better I'll be glad to hear from you.
jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (09/23/86)
How about public-key cryptography to allow secure private message transfers on the BBS. That should wow your advisor! -John Sangster jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa
Wayne%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Wayne McGuire) (09/27/86)
Wrt to your BBS project for the ST: The commands for retrieving and manipulating messages on every micro BBS I have ever seen have been hopelessly primitive. With a megabyte of RAM to work with, why shouldn't one be able to scan or read collections of messages by any combination of criteria of sender, receiver, time, text string, etc.? (For example: >Read From Jones To Smith During 1985 Text Qlisp) Why shouldn't an ST BBS (particularly on the forthcoming multimeg machines) be at least as sophisticated as Mark Crispin's MM mail processing program that is popular on the Arpanet, and perhaps, going one step further, include a small-scale natural language interface similar to Q&A? Better yet, I would like to see a full-scale communications program for the ST that included all the standard BBS functions and the mail processing abilities of MM, Babyl, and Zmail (the last is standard on Symbolics machines, and is the most powerful mail processor I've yet encountered). Such a program would be quite intelligent about automatically downloading and storing the message bases of Compuserve, Delphi, Arpanet hosts, TBBS systems, Fido systems, etc., presenting a unified interface for offline retrieval, reading, and reply-writing, and automatically uploading replies to the appropriate hosts. I don't actually expect you'll have the time to write such a program for your dissertation, but I wish someone at one of the major software houses would get on the ball. Wayne McGuire (wayne@oz.ai.mit.edu)