Hey,

People have recently been talking about BBJ and I was thinking
how cool it'd be if one could bridge BBJ and USENET.

Dunno if it's practical, but I think it'd be helpful for
keeping up with both BBJ and the 'net. I'd be happy to try to
write something: it'd be a good challenge. One would just need
to know how to communicate with BBJ. I'll have to ask on IRC.

randomuser | randomuser@tilde.club | http://t.c/randomuser
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-09-22, randomuser@tilde.club <randomuser@tilde.club> wrote:

Hey,

People have recently been talking about BBJ and I was thinking
how cool it'd be if one could bridge BBJ and USENET.

Dunno if it's practical, but I think it'd be helpful for
keeping up with both BBJ and the 'net. I'd be happy to try to
write something: it'd be a good challenge. One would just need
to know how to communicate with BBJ. I'll have to ask on IRC.

randomuser | randomuser@tilde.club | http://t.c/randomuser

I suppose it would be possible to create a bbj newsgroup in here that
pulls in the posts on BBJ. I'm not sure about the reverse, though. BBJ
has its own user system, so I'm not sure if that aligns with an email
post from net news. Interesting topic to explore, though. :)
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

I suppose it would be possible to create a bbj newsgroup in here that
pulls in the posts on BBJ. I'm not sure about the reverse, though. BBJ
has its own user system, so I'm not sure if that aligns with an email
post from net news. Interesting topic to explore, though. :)

Does BBJ have any sort of message-ID metadata already? Seems like that'd
have to be a first step if one wants to start linking BBJ instances across tildes. 0xfeedface@town, etc.

It's a neat idea but I worry it leads down a path that leads to needlessly reinventing Fidonet, lol.

Might be easier and more practical to have bots that scrape BBJ and make a once-daily NNTP post "BBJ discussions on Town for 21 September 2020". Not
even necessarily mirroring the posts, just saying what people are talking about.

"5 post(s) about Introductions"
"1 post(s) about Perl regexes, halp"
"131 post(s) about vi > emacs, change my mind"

etc, etc.


--
Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-09-22 at 09:44 lkosov wrote:

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

I suppose it would be possible to create a bbj newsgroup in here that
pulls in the posts on BBJ. I'm not sure about the reverse, though. BBJ
has its own user system, so I'm not sure if that aligns with an email
post from net news. Interesting topic to explore, though. :)

Does BBJ have any sort of message-ID metadata already? Seems like that'd
have to be a first step if one wants to start linking BBJ instances across >tildes. 0xfeedface@town, etc.

It's a neat idea but I worry it leads down a path that leads to needlessly >reinventing Fidonet, lol.

Might be easier and more practical to have bots that scrape BBJ and make a >once-daily NNTP post "BBJ discussions on Town for 21 September 2020". Not >even necessarily mirroring the posts, just saying what people are talking >about.

"5 post(s) about Introductions"
"1 post(s) about Perl regexes, halp"
"131 post(s) about vi > emacs, change my mind"

etc, etc.

--
Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) >He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm

wouldn’t really need to directly scrape from bbj. ~team has the listing from bbj on a web page that probably easier to scrape.

https://bbj.tildeverse.org/


--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-09-22, randomuser@tilde.club <randomuser@tilde.club> wrote:

People have recently been talking about BBJ and I was thinking
how cool it'd be if one could bridge BBJ and USENET.

To be honest, I'd prefer to keep bbj separate - privat and local
so to speek.
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

To be honest, I'd prefer to keep bbj separate - privat and local
so to speek.

Might I inquire as to why you think this way?
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-10-08, randomuser@tilde.club <randomuser@tilde.club> wrote:

To be honest, I'd prefer to keep bbj separate - privat and local
so to speek.

Might I inquire as to why you think this way?

I'm not sure there's a great value in merging the two since they
function so differently, but i don't think there's much case against the private/local thing. Perhaps it's the USENET word that's confusing
stuff, but tilde's net news does not connect to the broader USENET. It's
just a private net news chain.
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

I'm not sure there's a great value in merging the two since they
function so differently.

I personally think there's great value in bridging NNTP and BBJ. For one, I think they operate on the same essential concepts:

- posts
- threads/replies
- mentions

The only thing unique to NNTP is the multiple newsgroups feature. However,
this problem could be easily cirumvented by using a seperate newsgroup for
BBJ related communications. Something like tilde.bbj, or something.

I should also probably go into detail as to how I wish to implement this,
so here it is.

Register (or post under) the username nntpbot or bbjbot. (This

eliminates the need to register different accounts for different users.)

Inside the message body, provide the original person who posted it, along

with the timestamp of the post. Follow this with the content of the post in question.

The script (or compiled program) that impliments this behaviour should be

run as a CRON job or something similar.

For replies, one would need to make a algorithm that somehow detects

threads. This would be required to impliment replies.

I'm currently working on a prototype in C. If you'd like to help me, email
me at randomuser@tilde.club. Might post to tildegit later.

Perhaps it's the USENET word that's confusing
stuff, but tilde's net news does not connect to the broader USENET. It's
just a private net news chain.

Oh my word, whoops. Did not mean USENET. To be more specific, the
tildeverse NNTP server, located at news.tildeverse.org.

randomuser | randomuser@tilde.club | tilde.club/~randomuser
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113