Xref: utzoo alt.bbs:263 comp.misc:4287 Path: utzoo!hoptoad!pacbell!ames!pasteur!agate!bionet!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!lorrie.atmos.washington.edu!jeff 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> Sender: news@beaver.cs.washington.edu Distribution: na Organization: Ministry of Silly Walks Lines: 20 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.