From: elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us (Edward J. Branley)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs
Subject: Re: Sad to say...
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 92 08:28:05 CDT
Organization: Minas Tirith BBS (Public Access Usenet for New Orleans)

davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane) writes:

> >No.  All of them have separate administrative types.  As I said, there's so
> >much overlap among these systems that it's all very confusing.  It's not
> >unusual for someone in one city to be a co-ordinator in multiple nets.  This
> >normally someone with a big hard drive, faster modem, etc.
>
> Sounds technically interesting/challenging but administration
> could be tricky as the conventions/policies of one network don't
> necessarily hold with the other. There was an short attempt to gateway
> some fido stuff to alt.allsysops (I think it was called). It worked
> OK technically but the (alleged) rules of Fido didn't hold on USENET
> and it never came to anything.

Yeah, the fidonet rules are the main sticking point to many a good-faith
attempt to set up gateways.  Their rules are so tight (they demand 'ownership'
of everything that comes through their backbone, therefore total control) that
most others with less restrictive rules lose the desire to participate quickly.
I can remember even here in New Orleans, an attempt to form a local
chat/forsale group between fido and wwiv failed because the fido sysops didn't
want alias users in their echos.

The crossover of fido-technology networks is handled technically pretty well,
but there have been some humorous misadventures.  I can remember when we added
a new group in V-Net, some role-playing game or another, and its CRC value
coincided with the fidonet home brewing echo.  Since I was a fidonet hub at the
time I had both on the system, and was crossposting the homebrew stuff with the
game.  Gawd, you could see the flames leaping from the monitor at me when I
read my mail the next day!


> >Oh, definitely.  At one time, my system was in four nets.  Fidonet, V-Net,
> >PODnet, and ChateauNet.  I know of a system here in New Orleans that's in Fi
> >Rbbs-Net, KinkNet (adult), and one or two others, I believe.
> >
> >What ends up happening is that echomail (news) is passed within the
> >'OtherNets,' while netmail (mail) is passed through Fidonet.  The OtherNets
> >maintain 'ownership' of the echos (newsgroups) to keep them outside of Fidon
> >politics.  Since mail is more or less a private thing, and not really an iss
> >in terms of Fidonet, its larger distribution system is used for mail.
>
> So Fido is kept as the mail pathways and the mail goes over another.
> Not quite the same as how USENET can have one path for news and can
> another for mail but similar.

You're on the right track.  The biggest problem for all of the fido-technology
nets is the costs involved.  All of the fido sites are dialup lines, no T1
technology here.  That means that sysops are shelling out a lot of their own
bucks to ld carriers.  Usenet's reliance on institutional systems for the
backbone is one of the reasons it's so much more widespread.




>Edward J. Branley         elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us<
>Seashell Software, Metairie, LA            +1-504-455-5087<
Newsgroups: alt.bbs