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Getting started with MajorBBS

Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2020 9:40 pm
by Winzlo
Greetings! I am a Sysop from back in the early 80s who was forced to shut down a very successful TProBBS upon relocation for college. I was fortunate to be geographically close to the author and became friends with a small group of Sysops who eventually became beta sites for TProBBS II which sadly never made it to release before the Internet became the primary focus.

I am also a huge fan of the RTFM club, and have done so to the best of my ability. However, with a visual impairment, I now have to rely mostly on screen reading technology to do so which has made this notably more sophisticated. Thus, I turn to this form for assistance.

I have been a huge fan of this MajorBBS software since the 80's, and was an active user of Top City BBS from the Twin Cities, MN for many years. I recall a vast many gatherings of softball and hanging out, and met a ton of great people. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and I truly long to bring those days back in any way I possibly can.

When I found out MajorBBS was available with a free license, I had to get it. Now that I have, and have a stock BBS running on my private network as a VM, I've come up with some questions I am hopeful can be answered to help me move forward with this endeavor and truly bring my BBS back to life as a MajorBBS! I apologize for this being a longer list, but I have done as much research as I can before coming up with these questions.

1. Is asking for a birthday in MM/DD/YYYY format as well as an e-mail address best left to additional questionnaire entries (what I'm currently doing), or is there a better way?

2. Is there a way to enforce minimum/maximum field sizes for questionnaire entries, or can users exceed the [inverse text] entry areas designed using the editor?

3. The concept of "E-mail" is obviously going to be confusing for a BBS user who is coming from the Internet era. Is there a way to perform some kind of global search/replace on this to something more appropriate such as "Private Messages" or something?

4. MBBS4EVER provides a ton of doors that rely on a very specific license key and codes. I have no intention of circumventing the existing license agreement, so I'd like to know if anyone has details on how to get doors that used to be sold through GC?

5. Having followed the directions to the letter, and used MS-DOS 6.22 with CD-ROM support to perform the install, ICO driver install and 32-node activation, I am left with a single 2gb C: drive. Has anyone even come close to utilizing this much space, and if so, were additional 2gb drives added to augment space needs? I have full intention of running MajorBBS for the rest of my life, and would like to make sure I am planning for the future appropriately.

I greatly appreciate any assistance to any of these questions that you can provide, and I am definitely one of the ones eagerly awaiting the next major release of MajorBBS/Worldgroup!
-Winzlo, Sysop of [what used to be] The Future BS

Re: Getting started with MajorBBS

Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2020 12:57 am
by Duckula
Welcome Winzlo, great to have you here!

See below for my responses to your questions:

> 1. Is asking for a birthday in MM/DD/YYYY format as well as an e-mail
> address best left to additional questionnaire entries (what I'm currently
> doing), or is there a better way?

Date of birth is a default question so you should not have to ask for it and yes, e-mail address can be added as an additional signup question which is the only way to do this.

> 2. Is there a way to enforce minimum/maximum field sizes for questionnaire
> entries, or can users exceed the [inverse text] entry areas designed using
> the editor?

There is no way to enforce a size, it defaults to 79 characters and the user can't exceed this.

> 3. The concept of "E-mail" is obviously going to be confusing
> for a BBS user who is coming from the Internet era. Is there a way to
> perform some kind of global search/replace on this to something more
> appropriate such as "Private Messages" or something?

There is no built-in global replace option. You could use a utility (such as sed) to replace occurrences in the MSG files but it will likely be hit & miss or you could do it manually which would be time consuming. There may also be fields that are not in MSG files that you can't change.

> 4. MBBS4EVER provides a ton of doors that rely on a very specific license
> key and codes. I have no intention of circumventing the existing license
> agreement, so I'd like to know if anyone has details on how to get doors
> that used to be sold through GC?

Which specific ones are you looking for? Elwynor Technologies (www.elwynor.com) now owns a lot of the games/add-ons after buying out the previous developers so it would be worth checking out what they have.

> 5. Having followed the directions to the letter, and used MS-DOS 6.22 with
> CD-ROM support to perform the install, ICO driver install and 32-node
> activation, I am left with a single 2gb C: drive. Has anyone even come
> close to utilizing this much space, and if so, were additional 2gb drives
> added to augment space needs? I have full intention of running MajorBBS
> for the rest of my life, and would like to make sure I am planning for the
> future appropriately.

The 2GB size is a DOS limit (maximum partition size). Unless you intend to host a lot of files for people to download, it is unlikely that you will reach 2gb in system size anytime soon. The Audit Trail can take up some space so you might want to limit what you are logging.

You could always run the Windows version to avoid this and other limitations.

Re: Getting started with MajorBBS

Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2020 1:42 am
by Winzlo
Thanks for the useful information! I just put up a Windows Vista 32-bit VM and have Worldgroup running stock there now.