Talk:FidoNet

message: Hey 208.242.127.32, is the "famous Fidonet quotes" link that you added really necessary?  As far as I can tell they're not exactly famous quotes, the page itself looks more like it's just there to slander the fidonews editor's recent comments rather than being actual representative quotes of fidonet, and it can easily be found linked from its parent page anyway, which is already externally linked.
I can see a reason for linking the parody page itself, if only because it offers one perspective of fidonet.  Deep linking to pages within that site, though, seems superfluous and not exactly NPOV.  I'm going to remove it for now, but if someone would like to comment on its relevance and why it should be there, please do.
Izogi 11:08, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Link

message: I'm a bit uneasy about the addition of the fidotel.com external link a few minutes ago, especially since a reverse lookup of fidotel.com points directly back to 68.106.153.246.  This is the IP of the anonymous person who added it, which makes it seem more like advertising than a necessarily useful link.  Does anyone have any opinion about including this link?  To me it looks more like a BBS that provides fidonet than a proper fidonet link -- it'd fit much better on a BBS-related page, or a list of active BBS's. Izogi 3 July 2005 06:55 (UTC)
:Who are you to decide what is proper and not proper about a Fidonet listing in this article?  Are you a member of Fidonet?
::Um, that's why I'm asking.  I'm not an absolute authority, but then very few people are.  If people want to discuss things here and explain points of view, then I'll discuss them.  It'd help if more people who want to edit this page would actually do so unanonymously (by creating a Wikipedia account), and then monitor and contribute to the discussion page a bit more, but so far that hasn't really happened.
::I used to be very involved in Fido, and I'm not anymore. I still have an interest, but I'm equally interested in Wikipedia and keeping its integrity.  The article's published by Wikipedia, not by Fidonet.  Its not a mouthpiece for Fido, and if only Fido members were allowed to have a say, there would probably be some very biased one-sided information.
:::But having non-Fidonet members censor statements made by members is a bit biased too.
::::The only times I've removed things has been according to the Wikipedia editing guidelines, which exist for good reasons and heavily discourage vanity information, and that's exactly what this link looked like.  If you want to debate how the guidelines should apply here then please go ahead and debate it.  Please don't take other people's edits too personally, though.  If you'll explain why it should be there then I might actually agree with you. That's what this page is here for after all. Izogi 7 July 2005 00:16 (UTC)
::This article is also not supposed to be free advertising for someone who wants links to their website. (See Wikipedia:External_links and Wikipedia:Vanity_page.) I telnetted to this BBS for a look and it is quite cool and brings back memories, but there's nothing obvious to indicate that this particular BBS is any more important or relevant for Fido than many other BBS's.  If it's highly relevant and meaningful for fidonet in the eyes of many people, then maybe, but at least let someone who's not the sysop of the BBS post it, and then justify why it's so important.  Personally I'd rather see a list of BBS's that still carry Fidonet, if there's still a public nodelist available, just to be less biased. Izogi 5 July 2005 21:30 (UTC)
:::You've proven that you don't know that much about Fidonet....the nodelist is published every week....there are web rings pointing to Fidonet BBS systems/Fidonet related web sites.
:::Perhaps I should add some external links to that type of thing...or will you simply delete them because you don't think they are appropriate?
::::Whatever.  If that's what you think, I don't think you understand where I'm coming from. Go ahead and add them if you think they fit.  Just check it's within the editing guidelines.  I was only suggesting it as an alternative to solve a problem, but I'm not going to set aside time for it. Izogi 7 July 2005 00:16 (UTC)
:I know this is an old conversation, but it deserves to be repeated: you never "own" an article! Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles
:(And you should always sign your comments! :-) ) -- Algotr 21:57, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Addition of Fidotel link 

message: This could be interesting to know.  What's the point of FidoNet now that internet email has superseded it? ++Ehudshapira 00:41, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There may still be a few cases where FidoNet nodes are relied upon by people as their primary form of electronic communication, but I think the majority of FidoNet sysops there's not a lot of effort involved in keeping their nodes running. Their systems are highly automated, so there's not much to gain from shutting them down. ozzmosis 13:45, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Why do I keep my node (2:335/610) open? For fun. Because a few users still use it. To prove that Fidonet technology is still viable. To prove that I could build a complex hodge podge of dozens of different pieces of software in 1995 and have it working flawlessy even now. To spite all the people who say "Fidonet is dead". Is it enough? ;-)  --Lou Crazy 18:15, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Incidentally, the posters in FIDONEWS and FN_SYSOP echo only represent a very small minority compared to the rest of FidoNet. --ozzmosis 03:53, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I use Fidonet through Internet since it provides much more comfortable interface than Usenet. The channels are moderated, there is no spam, Outlook Express has a third-party add-on especially designed for such use, text is highlighted in different colors for different authors etc. The users are devided in three groups: those who use Fido-Usenet gate (as I do, about 40%), those who use IP-points (about 30%) and those who use conventional FIDO technologies (about 30%), so the newsgroups are usually havily populated and new groups are created frequently. --Dojarca 14:20, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  To add: why does it still exist? 

message: There is a proposal from User:DarthVader to merge from FidoBBS.  I'm not sure what the rationale for that is.  I do think though that the FidoBBS article is misnamed (should probably be called Fido (BBS software)). --ozzmosis 09:31, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge from [[FidoBBS]] 

message: Some user keeps posting actual FidoNews articles on the FidoNews page. It is not appropriate for FidoNews to use Wikipedia as a publication venue. Can the editors of this article help me with communicating to this user? (See the Talk:FidoNews page.) – Chris53516 (Talk) 20:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Help with [[FidoNews]] page

message: This article notes "Compuserve, Minerva or Prodigy" in a context talking about online systems. What was Minerva? Maury Markowitz (talk) 18:32, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: After some googling, it appears Minerva was a newspaper-run local BBS on the US west coast. Certainly not in the same league as CIS or Prodigy. Removing mention. Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:31, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mierva? 

message: "When run, it would read through the new email messages on the machine [...]"
I would suggest: "When run, it would read through the new email messages (netmail and echomail) on the machine [...]".
Although the term email became common later on, I don't recall FidoNet mail being commonly called "email" at the time I used FidoNet, so using only "email" there appears like revisionism to me.  It might even be more appropriate to expand it to "electronic mail", perhaps.  Thanks, 76.10.128.192 (talk) 11:55, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It's correct as it is - at that point it was only email, echomail was added about two years later. Maury Markowitz (talk) 19:20, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  email -> netmail and echomail 

message: Both FidoNet vs. FIDONET are used. Should it be FIDONET throughout? It seems to change from FIDONET to FidoNet in the beginning of subsection "Echomail". Was it renamed at that time?
--Mortense (talk) 13:21, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The use of FIDONET in the article looks like it's being used to differentiate between the specific mailer and the entire network. Since they are two different things with (almost) the same name, I think it's just fine the way it is. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks seems like it applies here. Going by that, when discussing the network as whole FidoNet is a much better choices than FIDONET, which is needlessly distracting. Grayfell (talk) 23:01, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: No one but newbies who didn't understand the capslock key ever called it "FIDONET".  Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:04, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  FidoNet vs. FIDONET 

message: Wasn't Netmail also called Matrix? --62.19.55.63 (talk) 21:47, 14 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Matrix 

message: This article should cover other FidoNet-technology networks (FTNs), or we should have an article about that.  There were at least a dozen non-trivial ones.  An FTN, a.k.a. an othernet, is any ad hoc, asynchronous computer network based primarily on the protocols and software originally developed for the FidoNet bulletin board system network.  I recall there was one named Alternet or AlterNet or AltNet (though other things that were not FTNs used those and similar names), and I started one ca. 1992 called IndraNet, which had member systems in most US states, and between 10 and 20 other countries. I don't recall the names of any of the others, but I recall there being a published list, with node and contact information, so one of these may have survived in an Internet archive somewhere.   Documenting this may be a challenge, but it's a significant "lost media" topic, like Mail art and Factsheet Five, Delphi (online service) and BITNET and Commercial Internet eXchange, and Bulletin board system itself. Thousands of systems with totals of at least tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of users, were participating every day for years in FTNs other than FidoNet itself (and their genesis was largely a combination of the "fight-o-net" problem, Fido's "good ol' boy's club" administration, its censorship, and its backward attitude to user privacy and encrypted messaging, among other factors.  Anyway, just googling "fidonet technology network" coughs up some stuff, including other wikis (can't cite them, but they may themselves have already found some reliable sources, and/or be linking to archived material), a book called Critical Perspectives on the Internet that at least mentions them in passing, some perl extensions for FTN message processing, and FidoNet Technical Standards Committee specs that define the term.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:18, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should cover other FTNs 

message: The article currently offers this reason why points are popular in Europe:
Point software employs standard compression (ZIP, ARJ, etc.) and so keeps the calls down to a few minutes a day at most
Well every offline reader does this as well. So I fail to see how this is a distinction. Maury Markowitz (talk) 16:22, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Points vs. offline readers 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on FidoNet. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20010511145808/http://www.tlchost.net/echolist/ to http://www.tlchost.net/echolist/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 10:42, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified