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From: jeff@lorrie.atmos.washington.edu (Jeff L. Bowden)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.misc
Subject: Re: New Ideas in BBSes (No BS!)
Message-ID: 
Date: 5 Dec 88 00:17:11 GMT
References: <1217@cps3xx.UUCP> <2093@uokmax.UUCP> <2324@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <842@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>
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In-reply-to: gl8f@bessel.acc.Virginia.EDU's message of 4 Dec 88 07:44:05 GMT

All these ideas for user friendly BBS software are good.

BUT DON'T CASTE YOUR INTERFACE IN CONCRETE!

I think the best solution is to set up something similar to NNTP wherin the
caller asks the server for new message headers and messages.  This solves two
problems:

(1) The server doesn't need to remember which messages each user has seen.  The
    user program handles this.

(2) Anyone with a computer can access it and no one is tied to a particular
    interface which he may or may not like.

A simple line-oriented interface could be written in C and ported *everywhere*.
Fancier interfaces could be written for each machine by those who desire them.
It seems to me that much of the existing software that does netnews could be
adapted to implement this.

If you make your protocol public, *everyone* can get into the act.