Subj : What I Don't Like About Synchronet
To   : Ryan de Laplante
From : Mvan Le
Date : Thu May 03 2007 07:09 am

 ML> As of v3.14, there're a couple of things I don't 
 ML> like about Synchronet. 

 ML> Mainly its message reading functionality. Thus 
 RdL> far this is my critique, 

 RdL> Yes I agree, I don't particularly like it either.  

Man did you write How To Win Friends And Influence People ? or was that Dale 
Carnagie ... :)

[...]

 RdL> Thanks.  You know back in the 90's when everyone was telling me I should 
 RdL> be using Telegard, PC Board, or whatever.. I never 
 RdL> switched.  I was the only Maximus BBS in our county 
 RdL> for a long time and spread the word.  A few people 
 RdL> tried it but it was too hard for them.  In 2003 when I broguht my bbs 

Yeah. Maximus is for massochists - like people who use Unix and love reading 
man pages all day. My *.ctl files are full of notes & anecdotes. Can't do that 
with PC Board / Telegard / RA.

 RdL> back to life I insisted on keeping it Maximus, or not 
 RdL> opening it again.  I gave the new Linux maximus a try 
 RdL> but it wasn't usable so I waited it out.... for 4 
 RdL> YEARS.  Read the MUFFIN archives, you'll see my posts have always asked 
 RdL> about supporting DOS doors.  How much longer am I 
 RdL> supposed to wait to get Maximus running in Linux with 
 RdL> DOS doors?  As you have seen I have explorered 

I don't think there'll be any major Maximus developments for another 10 years.

 RdL> alternatives such as running the entire Maximus system 
 RdL> inside of dosbox or dosemu.  I don't want to switch, 
 RdL> but I'm not waiting another 4 years.  I think you even 

I don't understand why you can't run it in VMware. All DOS stuff will have to 
run in VM eventually - DOSBOX, DOSEMU, Ntvdm ... Because your primary concern 
is with doors, and most of them are DOS doors; you're only delaying the 
inevitable. It won't matter whether you run your BBS under Linux or Solaris 
unless those doors are cross-compiled to other platforms there'll be qwerks or 
disfunction.

Most BBS's run under Win32 or Microsoft derivative because these platforms and 
OS's were the most popular during the BBS era. I've seen no serious gaming or 
door variety under *nix ports of BBS software, and SysOps that choose to host a 
BBS under *nix have skeleton setups and run them for novel reasons like making 
use of an old 386 running Debian etc.


--- Maximus/2 3.01
 * Origin: Top Hat 2 BBS (1:343/41)

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