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I am afraid I don't have any great answers other than taking some of the ideas that made BBSs great as a whole and combining them into something entirely new. T

I am afraid I don't have any great answers other than taking some of the ideas that made BBSs great as a whole and combining them into something entirely new. There I have a few thoughts, but then we're not really talking about BBSs. The fact things were on a phone line helped in some ways (exclusivity, time, identifiability), but doing it all through a mobile phone or other telephony does not really capture that. For one, there would only be single node BBSs unless you got creative, so I think the mobile phone part is too literal on the concept of phones. Secondly, while this is less popular, a lot of us including myself were not actually identifiable unless we wanted to be. This happened because you could call a BBS through an intermediary such as a PBX, and it was common to war dial to find and hack these (or use open hardware) to dial out long distance. Another way was carding (stealing credit cards) to pay for calls, which would also often answer caller ID requests with another number than your own depending on what you bought. The anonymity was more complicated as you can see, but yes, it did help quite a bit to have some sort of reputation attached to your name. A BBS handle could carry weight across many systems, and word did spread. Some Sysops were pretty nasty to people and went out of their way with that, but I think most people accepted it and didn't do things like try to take them to court like we have today. Somehow, whether they knew who you were or not, it just was not worth it and getting other users to accept you in one form or another was important. This happened via message bases, uploads (try to be top, avoid being banned for bad uploads), new user signup, games, and more. So souring your reputation had a cost if you were an avid BBSer, and even more so if you had met people in real life. I think anything remotely similar to BBSs in terms of success needs to do at least some of these things: - No frills access - Tie things together as a cohesive hole - "Character" per system. Logging on to X should not be the same as logging on to Y, but familiar enough to still be usable. - Distributed (run by a person/people) - No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot - Cross-over between the real-world and the virtual-world. Ex: In person meetings. - Sense of urgency - Connections to several rabid groups of sub-culture that will drive future updates, modding, usage, etc. In the old days, this was HAM Radio operators, ANSI artists, Anarchists, Punks, Crackers, Warez kids, Phreakers, D&D players, and many other groups. - Decent give and take type systems. Ratios, time, and chat often worked this way and sometimes were all interconnected. The more you upload, the more time you get, and the more you can chat for example. Many more things, but I'll stop there.

VLM 10y ago
"No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot" I remember enormous controversy at the time about modem manufacturers who would sell you a high speed (for the time) modem for free or a substantial discount if you put a little advertisement for their modem on your board and it was NOT well received. I think this was around the era of dueling and completely incompatible 9600 baud modems. I skipped that horrible era and went right from 2400 to 14400 then rapidly to 28800. Class based access levels were a thing in the BBS era. It seems hard to believe in 2016 web page world where there's maybe "have an account vs no account" or at most "guest/free/paid" but some BBSes had a zillion levels of participation and allowed time and ratio requirements. Some got a little eye roll-y over specific. Active discouragement of lurking, is how I'd phrase it.
- optionalparens 10y ago
  Agreed. A lot of BBSs both thrived and ruined themselves over having pay tiers. Sometimes it was pay for "premium" content which was usually warez, porn, etc. Then there was a period of charging for access to parts of the Internet (gateways), like email or usenet messages through your BBS.Other BBSs simply asked for donations and got quite a bit because people were passionate. Ugh, modem incompatibility was an awful thing. The modem manufacturers often got greedy or out right lied about supporting standards correctly. It really was a case of needing to pay for quality. The worst period I remember was toward the end of the era with "Win modems" tied to windows. They'd pop these pieces of junk inside Dell, Packard Bell, eMachines, Compaq, and other consumer junk. You're absolutely right about tiered access. I will say that torrent sites, especially private ones do have some levels of tiered access. As do some web forums in terms of moderation privileges. That's about the closest you get, but it's no where near as nuanced, draconian, or as powerful. The class-based access did have positive effects like you hint it such as discouraging lurking, creating exclusivity, encouraging uploads, discouraging bad actors. I kind of laughed at the web when years back they tried to do some version of that via game-ification and in most cases it ended badly excluding the obvious notables.

VLM 10y ago

"No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot" I remember enormous controversy at the time about modem manufacturers who would sell you a high speed (for the time) modem for free or a substantial discount if you put a little advertisement for their modem on your board and it was NOT well received. I think this was around the era of dueling and completely incompatible 9600 baud modems. I skipped that horrible era and went right from 2400 to 14400 then rapidly to 28800. Class based access levels were a thing in the BBS era. It seems hard to believe in 2016 web page world where there's maybe "have an account vs no account" or at most "guest/free/paid" but some BBSes had a zillion levels of participation and allowed time and ratio requirements. Some got a little eye roll-y over specific. Active discouragement of lurking, is how I'd phrase it.

optionalparens 10y ago
Agreed. A lot of BBSs both thrived and ruined themselves over having pay tiers. Sometimes it was pay for "premium" content which was usually warez, porn, etc. Then there was a period of charging for access to parts of the Internet (gateways), like email or usenet messages through your BBS.Other BBSs simply asked for donations and got quite a bit because people were passionate. Ugh, modem incompatibility was an awful thing. The modem manufacturers often got greedy or out right lied about supporting standards correctly. It really was a case of needing to pay for quality. The worst period I remember was toward the end of the era with "Win modems" tied to windows. They'd pop these pieces of junk inside Dell, Packard Bell, eMachines, Compaq, and other consumer junk. You're absolutely right about tiered access. I will say that torrent sites, especially private ones do have some levels of tiered access. As do some web forums in terms of moderation privileges. That's about the closest you get, but it's no where near as nuanced, draconian, or as powerful. The class-based access did have positive effects like you hint it such as discouraging lurking, creating exclusivity, encouraging uploads, discouraging bad actors. I kind of laughed at the web when years back they tried to do some version of that via game-ification and in most cases it ended badly excluding the obvious notables.