User talk:TreyVanRiper

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 * Many thanks, ManekiNeko. Also thanks for the helpful hints.. I'm still pretty new to this, and while I have some information to provide, I don't know if I will be as helpful as others. - TreyVanRiper 13:34, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Your comment on the Cit/UX AfD page
You said: "Although this probably isn't the place to ask this, I wonder if someone couldn't expand a little more on the 'controversial' nature of Citadel/UX's preference to calling itself 'Citadel'... this strikes me as keenly interesting to Citadelians (I'm one of them, and know something of the politics that occured back in the late 80s with the various varients, but not to enough of a degree to credibly record them for Wikipedia). Specifically, I would love to find other active Citadel projects, especially any that might be derived from the original source. There was also a rumor, long ago, that CrT intended to create an updated version of his Citadel software completely rewritten in C++ or something, but I never heard anything more than that."

As far as controversy, it's just that I have heard several people grumbling about the "name grab"; I think people find it presumptuous. Some Citadel developers continue working on the software the same way they have for years; occasional bug fixes and feature adds, without making a big deal out of it. (No SourceForge page, etc.; most Cit projects still appear to be the work of individuals.) So having one group say "We are Citadel now" just seemed out of place, even if it is true that Citadel development these days is otherwise pretty low-key. Besides that, however, there is the issue of confusion. Citadel has come to mean a genre of software, and having one program adopt that name is confusing (as one can see here on Wikipedia with the article names). When we talk about Citadel, we mean the overall genre of room-based BBSes, or the original CrT software -- having this new version of Cit/UX be named Citadel as well is just confusing. It's like renaming Firefox "Web Browser". (And really, I can't see why they wanted to name it that. Why not use a name that can be unequivocally theirs, to avoid confusion and make Google searches easier?) :)

Regarding "active" -- there are a few folks at Slumberland BBS who have been working on things, though progress is very slow as people have real life activities interfering. Brent Bottles has been working on an OS X version of Cit+, but that's still in the early stage of the process. Cit+ is of course descended from the original source. I don't know how much of that, if any, he intends to carry over to the new version. A couple other folks there have been dinking around with Perl cits, etc. Mostly development goes in spurts -- people do some work, then someone gets a girlfriend or a new job and it goes dormant for a while. But that's pretty typical in the Cit world, I think. :) Personally, I think that getting some new blood into it would be the best thing.

I think I have heard the CrT rumor as well, but nothing more. Which Citadels were you involved with? -- ManekiNeko | Talk 23:45, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Ah.. fair enough about the controversy. I simply hadn't heard that before; you'd think if there was some concern about something like that, the persons affected would perhaps log into the forum for that version of Citadel, and post their concerns. On the other hand, maybe they did and I just never saw them (got deleted, ignored, or something). It was my understanding that the author of the software had attempted to secure an 'okay' vote for taking on the name before simply grabbing it. As for why he wanted to do that... I don't really know.

I certainly agree about the confusion, though. Had they stuck with 'Citadel/UX', they would have avoided any and all confusion. I suppose, maybe, he just wanted to simplify the name. I also expect he wasn't thinking about Wikipedia when considering the name change, heh.

That's interesting about the other Citadels. Long ago, I wanted to derive my own Citadel project for some other computer (maybe it was an Amiga back then, I forget), but never really acquired the tools to do it.

The Citadel/UX project is very active, but I think that's because he turned the hobby into something that's a little bit more. Increasingly, the only thing 'Citadel' about that is the text client you can get for it. Otherwise, it bears no resemblance to the original source, or the original organization of the data (to which Mr. Cancro would easily agree).

I had set up my own Citadel BBS in the Asheville, NC area named 'Machine's Machination' (Mach's Mach). It lasted for about a year or two, after which I had to hang it up, as I couldn't afford the long distance fees (I was a college student at the time). Asheville's Mach's Mach networked with a couple of BBSes in the Minneapolis area, and ran on an old PC clone (one of the original Intel 8086 CPUs, running at about 7 Mhz, if I remember), using Citadel 86. Mach's Mach also ran in Camp Zama, Japan for about a year in 1988/1989, but obviously I couldn't network that node (I was an SP4 in the US Army, so I couldn't really afford long distance fees). That version of Mach's Mach ran on an Amiga 500 using Citadel 68k (Tony Preston's work... he maintained a presence on Uncensored for a good while in the early 2000s, incidentally, but I haven't seen him post anything now for a long while). In Japan, my BBS was known as the fastest changing BBS in the East, as I kept trying different kinds of software, before finally settling upon Citadel 68k.

Back in those days, I viewed Citadel as the best BBS software you could get. It let you do remarkable things with messages, without distracting you with ANSI animations and junk like that. You could download files, search for files, search for messages, leave messages, and with a little ingenuity, you could even perform batch uploads/downloads of messages. Eventually, I had even hacked together some little program that let you take messages in a particular room and archive them for display when people first logged in... sort of a way to let users contribute a pithy little quote without having to laboriously edit text files.

Lots of fun.TreyVanRiper 16:58, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

SpinnWebe has been nominated for AFD again
As a heads-up, SpinnWebe has been nominated for AFD a second time at Articles for deletion/SpinnWebe. I strongly encourage you to participate in the discussion. SchuminWeb (Talk) 03:03, 23 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Did you really do the things that Jersey Devil accuses you of doing in that AFD? Also, I'm curious about your interest in the Spinnwebe site, considering how he practically savaged your web site.  I find it fascinating that you'd accept such abuse. TreyVanRiper 13:32, 23 February 2006 (UTC)