Back in the paleolithic era, I was hooked on Tom Jennings' amazing FidoNET system for linking message boards across dial-up BBSes (I once had the mind-blowing experience of hearing Tom, Tim Pozar and John Gilmore tell the story of the day that Tim installed the code at John's ISP that connected Usenet and FidoNET for the first time, a kind of last-spike for the Information Superrailroad — I remember that day!). FidoNET was optimized for linking up conversations at a distance in places where long-distance calls cost a lot and didn't work so well, and that makes it ideally suited to the less-developed world, where FIDONet is still in use.
Now Jon describes the system he's built to bridge the Web into FidoNET, which you can access here:
I use a Linx BBS package called MBSEBBS and a PHP forum software package called Simple Machines. The intervening synchronizing that happens between the the BBS and the forums is achieved through a commercial program called Internet Rex (IREX) and some custom PHP scripts that I wrote.
I know that Fidonet isn't anywhere near as big as it used to be in North America, but it's still pretty bug in other parts of the world. I have only ported a dozen or so echoes just as sort of a proof-of-concept, but there are over 14,000 messages available.
As far as I know this is one of only a very very few web interfaces for Fidonet that aren't provided by the BBS package itself. And I think it *might* be the only one where a user can actually post to the Fidonet via the web.
(Thanks, Jon!)
