Announcements:
As of December 2001, the BBS News had not ben updated much, first due to Tommy Watt
no longer having time, and secondly by Mike Ehlert for no longer having time to update things
(ie: install php tools and update the site) when Tommy later reappeared and offered to jump back in.
A New BBSNews interface has now been installed Here.
Nexus BBS
Nexus BBS went open-source yesterday. George Roberts IV no longer has
time to develop Nexus, a DOS based Telegard/Renegade clone loosly based
on older TG that he had been working on for several years, up until
about a year ago. George no longer has time to activly develop Nexus,
but he said he will coordiate its open-source project, and still may
contribute to the code a bit.
Gene Buckle wasted no time porting Nexus over to Linux today. Not bad for
over 64,000 lines of code. :) Genes port will probally be made available
for download from the Nexus web site shortly. Gene also plans to port Nexus
to Win32. The win32 port will most likely consist of a main server program
that spawns clients and routes socket i/o to them via named pipes or sockets.
http://nexusbbs.net
EzyCom BBS
Version 2.0 of EzyCom is going to be released shortly, according Ezycoms
current developer, Stephen Gibbs.
EzyCom was a DOS based BBS originally developed by Peter Davies in Australia
during the early to mid 1990's. It was one of several clones of QuickBBS
(v2.6) developed in the same timeframe, sharing many of the same features
as 'RemoteAccess', 'SuperBBS', and 'Proboard' Bulletin Boards.
It never gained the popularity of some of those other clones like RA,
though it offered some advantages such as an improved Questionnaire
scripting language and both QWK and bluewave offline mail support, but
it lacked support for the industry standard JAM or Hudson and messagebase
formats.
Peter ended development after 1995 as many of the other BBS authors did,
but in 1999 the EzyCom development team was formed, which consisted of
Craig Jansen, Paul Sanders, and Stephen Gibbs, while Peter Davies continued
to own the copyright. They released version 1.49 in August 2000 which was
a minor update with a few features and fixes. According to Stephen Gibbs,
there was a fallout between lead programmer Craig Jansen and the rest of
the development team, because Craig refused to work under the developers
team agreement. Stephen said Craig was dropped from the team, and they
are no longer supporting that release (although it is still the only
version released by the team so far).
Stephen would not say what is new in the upcoming version 2.0 release,
but he has stepped in as the new developer for the team, and has been
teaching himself to code as he finds and fixes bugs. He has also added
some 'various features' of his own.
Stephen said that he would really like to Ezycom to include its own telnet
server like EleBBS, so that Ezycom sysops don't have to rely on programs
like COM/IP and Netmodem anymore. He goes on to say that this would be a
giant leap in his learning curve for pascal programming. Stephen is
considering a future Win32 port using the EleCom library.
http://ezycom.sytes.net
MysticBBS
Mystic developer James Coyle is currently reloacting to Arizona, but he
hopes to release MysticBBS v1.08 shortly, as well as build a new web based
community soon if things go well. New features in version 1.08 will include
an SMTP/POP3 mailer, Ftp Support, Newsgroup support, new MPL stuff and an
improved message reader.
Mystic has a large following in the old-school BBS
warez scene today, and is available in DOS, Windows, and Linux flavors.
It's been well over a year since the last public release of Mystic,
and it's good to see that James (aka GooRoo) is getting back into development.
http://mysticbbs.com
Mannsoft
Rick Parrish at Mannsoft is releasing the source code to a number of BBS
routines and utilities. Mannsoft is known for several BBS utils, including
TelSrv, the Windows BBS telnet server, and MANNIRC, a Win32 IRC chat door.
Rick now offers several of his BBS related pascal units for free including
Manndoor, a cross-platform doorkit for DOS and Windows.
However he is asking a small donation for the source to most of his products,
to help offset the cost of his webhosting.
http://www.mannsoft.ca/source.php
WWIV 5.0
WWIV 5.0alpha is pretty much complete and opterational, though there
are still a few quirks they need to work out. This version was ported from C to C++,
to allow cross platform development of the Win32, Linux, and OS/2 versions of
WWIV.
According to co-developer Trader Jack, once the port is completed they will
will decide on a feature set, implement the features, and then beta test it
before the source is made available. So far its native telnet handling will
run DOS doors under Windows NT/2K/XP with no additional drivers.
http://wss.wwiv.com/