Public Access Unix, BBS, Conferencing

[Bob Palowoda]

>From article <511186 at nstar.UUCP>, by larry at nstar.UUCP (Larry Snyder):
> In article <1654 at atha.AthabascaU.CA>, louis at cs.AthabascaU.CA (Louis Schmittroth) writes:
>> 
>> This will be a non-profit service with donated hardware.
>> We plan to give the user e-mail, a conferencing system, some Usenet
>> groups, and possibly a BBS system.  If there were one package that
>> would replace the BBS, conferencing system, and e-mail, so much
>> the better.  We have experience with an older version of CoSy, and
>> like some of it.  I was hoping that there might be something better
>> out there now, and either cheap or free.
> 
> AKCS will do exactly what you are looking for.  AKCS is a complete
> front end that can be used to keep callers out of the shell - yet
> the ability to send and receive mail, netnews, gated conferences,
> downloads, and is user friendly.
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  It may be friendly but it has a confuseing user interface. By confuseing
I mean that thier are so many arguments to options the first time user
would seem to get confused. I do agree it has a better Usenet/mail interface
into the bbs. If you look at alot of the dial-up bbs you notice the majority
have basic attibutes, a bulletin section, a main section, a message section,
a file's section and optionial sigs and what one would call doorways. It 
seems XBBS has done a very good job with this interface. It's plain simple,
stupied and easy to use and has consistencey of user interface of the 
what I would call mainstream bbs type programs. XBBS lacks sysop utilities
and maintance features though. I wish the user profile information was
in a file with fields similiar to a database. I guess this would make
it easier to come up with a way to interface the bbs user into the 
usenet news. One trick I have learned is to modify 'readnews' and/or 'vnews'
striping out the shell functions, save, write and external command features.
Than call up this separate compiled newsreader for first time users. It 
at least allows new users to read the news and there is no worry about
them have "shell access".  In the future hopefully Sandy will come up with
a scheme to manage the user profile, bbs user directory, and allowable 
programs and paths a user can execute into some sort of database file.
  

---Bob                     

-- 
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