From: lmbailey@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Laurana Bailey) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.datacomm Subject: Re: BBS programs Message-ID: <7379@vela.acs.oakland.edu> Date: 19 Jun 91 17:26:36 GMT References: Organization: Lemming-Aid 1992 - Benefit Concert To Save The Lemmings Lines: 77 In article sargon@therip.UUCP (Kevin Whittum) writes: | Hello, | | I'm planning on starting a bbs here in Michigan... I was wondering what | good PRG are out there to use? | | I've seen Paragon, Skyline, Sterling Silver, Tag, Petra, & PCBBS... etc. | | I'm so far interested in Skyline and Paragon. I would like to be able to | net w/ UNIX and Fidonet. I'm planning to buy a US ROBOTICS 9600 HST/V.32 | V.42bis modem and will be buying a Quantumn 105meg HD next week. I have 5 | megs of ram, 2 3.5" drives, 40meg Quantum HD... | Which bbs do you think would be the best w/ this setup? | You're in luck. My boyfriend runs a Paragon BBS and has beta-tested Skyline back when it was known as Atreides and sold by Incognito (Now defunct). The system he runs is called Les's Place and his name is, obviously, Les. He still has Paragon although he is considering moving to another package. First, Skyline. As I said, he beta-tested some early versions and they left a bad taste in his mouth. He hasn't looked at it recently so it could have improved very much, but Les won't bother looking because there were things about it he didn't care for at the time and Skypix is a very pretty, but useless, feature. Paragon has gone through some major ups and downs over the years. Jon Radoff was porting it from the ST and the original author Eric Drewry. Well, Jon sort of dropped out of sight and left owners hanging for quite a time. Eric stepped in and bought out Jon's rights to the software and has since been re-writing it. It will change it's name back to what it was on the Atari ST, namely StarNet. From what we have heard from the beta-testers Eric has done an excellent job in cleaning up the code and getting it running faster and better than ever before. Still, however, the first release of StarNet isn't out and Eric's been at it since January or so. Slow development time seems to be a problem with Paragon/StarNet which is why Les is considering another platform. StarNet is, however, pretty good and has gotten better under Eric's guidence. Problems are addressed when reported and Eric does work hard at his coding. There is support of ANSI in almost every area of the BBS except for the messages themselves though that it promised soon. There are currently two very good ANSI based message editors that can be dropped into the program and used in place of the normal line editor (Which isn't the best.) Paragon/StarNet does have the widest selection of Doors programs out for any of the BBS systems though, and thats a big plus. (Les even writes one called Castle Dungeon which is being ported to DLG PRO BBS and C-Net) If you like Paragon/StarNet you may want to look into XenoLink Amiga BBS as it has many of the same features as Paragon, some better implemented, a faster development turn-around and will even use most Paragon/StarNet doors programs. DLG PRO BBS is the most expensive of the ones out, but is also very good. It will support Fido as well as UseNet in the message bases and doors programs can be anything you can run from the CLI. I have heard whispers of a new BBS called FreeForm that is supposed to blow all the others out of the water, but the author hasn't allowed anyone to see it yet. Supposedly it will allow one to emulate ANY of the 42 or so BBS programs out for the Amiga. I will post some info on XenoLink and what little I have on FreeForm in the next couple posts. Laurana -- /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ |Just another lemming... | Yet another Amiga maniac set loose | | | on the world...and you thought things| |lmbailey@vela.acs.oakland.edu | couldn't get any worse. |