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This page lists known BBS projects, both active and inactive, and is a work in progress. If you spot something that should be added, edited etc. please contact the webmaster.
ENiGMA½ BBS is authored by Bryan Ashby aka NuSkooler. The project began in October 2015, driven through a lack of diversity in the BBS scene and no modern open source solutions being available.
ENiGMA½ is written in Node.js, and has a very active development community with other developers contributing to the ENiGMA codebase and multiple boards spun up.
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Inactive Project
Written by Andrew Pamment (apam) Magicka BBS is not being actively developed but bug fixes are still updated. The author is now developing Talisman BBS.
Magicka BBS is a free opensource BBS system for Linux/macOS/FreeBSD, other operating systems such as NetBSD and OpenBSD may work. Magicka is known to run on x86_64, arm and aarch64 platforms.
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MBSE BBS is a fully FTN-capable ANSI BBS package including a mailer (ifcico clone), BinkD daemon, mail tosser, TIC processor, filefind, and other utilities allowing access via modem and the Internet using telnet, ssh, http and ftp.
The software was written by Michiel Broek with a desire by the author to have a system that met his needs and not wanting to run shareware software any more. The first version appeared in 1998 with the first public release available from September 1999.
Broek ceased development in August 2013 but others have carried on with the project. The current MBSE Development Team is Andrew Leary (ajleary), Michael Dillon (gsvalore), and Sean Dennis (digimaus).
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Mystic BBS was conceived around 1995 and first released to the public in 1997 after the author James Coyle aka g00r00 became frustrated with the lack of customization available with Renegade, and the lack of stability in many more flexible software packages.
It is a popular BBS software for those who share a common interest in ANSI art and BBS modding. With the fall of MS-DOS and the decline of BBSes in general, Mystic released an OS/2 and Windows 32 native version in 1998. Mystic was the first of the non-commerical MS-DOS based BBS softwares to integrate directly with the Telnet protocol. It also went on to release a native Linux version in 1999, and the first to introduce a standardized platform for DOOR games across all 4 operating systems.
In 2011, Mystic removed its DOS version, added a native Mac OSX version, and went open source for several years. The author has worked hard to better integrate with Internet protocols. It now has internal Telnet, RLOGIN, SSH, NNTP, POP3, SMTP, FTP and BINKP servers.
In early 2015, Mystic introduced a stable release for Raspberry Pi with 1.10 and went closed source again. Mystic now provides the only integrated BBS and echomail solution for the Raspberry Pi (ARM Linux) and OS-X (Macintosh) platforms. The project is still being developed in Free Pascal by its original author.
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Written by Andrew Pamment (apam) Talisman is a telnet style bulletin board system for Linux & Windows. It is a system that mixes the best bits of his previous BBS systems (Magicka BBS / Titan BBS). Talisman is opensource and licensed under the GNU GPLv3.
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Abandoned Project
Written by Andrew Pamment (apam) Titan BBS was an experimental BBS written in C++ for Linux and Windows. It utilized parts of C++17 found in Visual Studio 2019 (and recent versions of Visual Studio 2017) and GCC 8+. On Linux CMake was used to configure.
Titan used sqlite3 for messages, user bases, file bases etc. It came with it's own FTN message tosser TitanFTN. Titan also relied on third party utilities for some features. SEXYZ for file transfers and InfoZIP for archiving.
WWIV is computer bulletin board system (BBS) originally written in Basic, ported to Pascal, C and finally C++. WWIV v5 is Open Source released under the Apache License version v2.0.
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Abandoned Project
Written by Jeff Quast and Johannes Lundberg in Python, x/84 was an experimental python 2 Telnet (and SSH) BBS. The primary purpose of x/84 was to provide a server framework for building environments that emulate the feeling of an era that predates the world wide web. The project is Open Source.