Convecticus

The only sensible logic I could come up with is where a new version is broken in some awful way, but an older version is not.

But, obviously, that only works if the people haven’t already upgraded.

I like that you’re describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.

FidoNet does still exist, but it’s commonly called “fight-o-net” for a reason, as there are… some characters there.

If you do resurrect your node, I’d suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it’s the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.

Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop’s day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you’d like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.

But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.

And if you’re wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.

I followed that link, and the post itself seems to not be that, no one in comments was pointing to anything that was a smoking gun on that, and someone else linked to the CEO directly saying that, no, absolutely not, it’d be bad business to do so.

Which feels weird to defend GoDaddy, because, while I haven’t used them in a few years, my experience with them is that they’re an awful registrar, but mostly because of how hard they make it to transfer away and how sleazy they get with sales tactics. And their ads haven’t been… good, but I’d probably let that slide if they provided reliable, good service.

I thought that was the sensible solution, though – you have your own domain names, but then use some reputable e-mail provider for the actual server.

E.g., I use mxroute, and wouldn’t imagine setting up the e-mail servers myself, even though I still wind up having to muck about in the DNS records when getting things set up.

On the note of corporate addresses, I remember that I had a bigfoot.com e-mail address, that was supposed to be “permanent”, and work as a forwarding thing, as I switched between various ISPs for my e-mail address.

It was significantly less permanent than having my own domains. And, with Google, we never quite know when they’re get bored or run into money issues. But some of my domains? I’ll probably have them as long as I’m alive, and that’s probably long enough.

I’ll second that. I’ve been using them for 4 or 5 years, and have been pleased.

There even was a day where there was an outage for my server, and they made it right by giving everyone credits roughly equal to 3 years of service or something. I thought that was overkill, and I guess they’ll take a loss on it, but… the instincts are nice. It seems like a place where it’s some dude taking care of servers, rather than a giant corporation who is more focused on extracting money than providing a great service for a reasonable cost.