Subj : FSP-10xx-1: BBSID Kludge Specification
To : Rob Swindell
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Wed Dec 27 2023 12:38 pm
Hello Rob,
On Tuesday December 26 2023 15:05, you wrote to All:
RS> BBSID: <bbs-id>
RS> Where <bbs-id> is a string of between 2 and 8 monocased ASCII
RS> characters, begining with an alphabetic character (betweeen 'A'
RS> and 'Z' inclusive). Only MS-DOS compatible filename characters
RS> may be included in a BBS-ID.
1) In my logic "between 2 and 8" is the range that starts at 3 and ends at 7.
2) What exactly do you mean by "monocased"?
A) Upper case only.
B) Either case but the same case for all characters in the string.
C) Any case but case will be ignored when processing.
D) Something else.
3) Although I have done my fair share of MS-DOS programming even I do not know out of head any more exactly which characters are allowed in an MS-DOS file name. It has been too long ago. This will only get worse. It may be better not to refer to MS-DOS but to explicitly specify the characters.
4) But why all these restrictions? The time that memory, disk space or processing power were relevant limitations in issues like this is long gone. Considering that there is no central registration and that BBS sysops will not choose a random string of characters but choose something that relates to the BBS name, the chance of a conflict with only 8 characters is not neglegible. So why these limitations? why not 32 bytes instead of 8? And why ASCII only? The world of BBSing is bigger than the US and Canada and some may want to use non ASCII characters. Why not allow UTF-8?
5) But the most daring question is: why should this be a FIDONET standard? Technically Fidonet technology starts at the system outbound and ends at the system inbound. What happens beyond those borders is technically no concern of Fidonet. While BBSs can use Fidonet technology to exchange messages, there are many other ways for BBSs to achieve the same goal and these days Fidonet is probably no longer even be the main means to do so. I would say this should be a BBS standard rather than a Fidonet standard.
6) As a side note I would like to add that the idea is not entirely new. Henk Wevers introduced the GIF kludge in his BBS/mailer programme Dutchie. It allowed a portet of the author of the message to be diaplayed on the screen. The GIF kludge did not make it into a Fidonet standard.
