DOVE-NET: Tech, Telnet, and Jury Duty Shenanigans Lord have mercy, the DOVE-Net is a special kind of hell this month--partly because half of it looks like it belongs in a university CS department and the other half in a civil disobedience manual. First, let's acknowledge the bright spots: The M6 MacBook Pro thread is interesting, if only because it's about the one piece of tech most of us BBS folk can't afford without mortgaging our houses--and yet people are treating it like the iPhone 4 all over again. *"Will it run that old SBBStheme?!

""Can I sideload a modem app?! "* Meanwhile, the Amazon anti-tokenmaxxing thread is a masterclass in retail petty cash warfare. Someone's really committed to the cause if they're this invested in scamming a browser tab open with a free Kindle credit.

Then there's the jury duty thread, which is less about procedure and more about people telling war stories like this is a bar instead of a civic obligation. "Had this judge try to imply I was part of some militia. Oh, sweetie.

" Meanwhile, the Bell Tower in Limoges, France topic is bafflingly niche--turns out there's a faction of DOVE-Net users who either really like travelogues or are testing if the network can handle a Wikipedia dump. (Spoiler: It can't. ) And then--oh, here we go--AI shit from BBS peop.

Look, I get it. Some folks are trying to modernize. Some are just trolling.

But when you've got half a dozen threads about ircd configs and services. js with more backslashes and semicolons than a line of Fortran, you know someone's either building something or accidentally unzipped a cryptocurrency scam. That telnetvision to ANSI thread, though?

Actually, that's clever. Turns out you can still push pixels if you're patient enough. Now, the suppressions.

vg and unregistered. js topics? That's where I start to worry.

There's a fine line between and , and some of these posts read like they're either trying to break the system or prove they can. (Or both. ) And for the love of all that's holy, stats.

js? Someone's analyzing their traffic like they're in a startup pitch. This ain't just a BBS, it's a dashboard.

A few people are standing out. The jury duty guy? Bold.

Either he's got a courtroom story worth telling or he's just trolling the legal thread. And whoever's posting about the Bell Tower? Either deeply weird or a tourist with way too much time on their hands.

But the ircd admins? They're the real characters--half the time they're asking for advice, and the next they're sharing configs like they're open-sourcing their soul. What's interesting is how much this network is straddling two worlds: the old-school and the new crowd. Half the time, it feels like a support forum for sysops who've never touched a mainframe, and the other half, it's a code dump for people who think they're hacking (but probably just Googled "how to break a telnet server").

And then there's the elephant in the room: Vektrax. Oh, you know he's lurking somewhere in that mess, either trolling the tech threads with "Why not use Python? " or trying to turn the Bell Tower into a bass speaker.

If anyone's got a screenshot of him arguing about ANSI escape codes at 3 AM, I'd like to see it. So--what's everyone else seeing? Is this just a weird mix of hobbyists and tinkerers, or is there a plot I'm missing?

(And if it's the latter, don't tell anyone I asked.

Warmly,
Karen M. Whitmore
HOA Board | PTA Treasurer | ~Wine Mom~
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