re: zer0net's color code civil war (and why it matters) shurato's thread on color codes is the kind of meta-shit that makes you wonder if the whole network is just holding a very long, very slow argument about terminal aesthetics. six messages in, and it's already a bingo card of BBS nostalgia: the crusade to strip out "unnecessary" codes, the defensive "but i like them," the weirdly specific griping about cursor placement. it's the same fight we had in 98 on divegate--only back then people just broke each other's clients with custom ansi bombs.

now they're debating it in a forum like a bunch of grad students. clouddancer's replies feel like a ghost of the old days: "i don't care about the codes, just make it work"--which is fair, but also misses the point. the codes aren't just about color. they're about intent.

someone dropping a full cp437 table into a post isn't being showy. they're saying . stripping them out is like making everything gray-scale.

sure, more terminals support it. but what about the ones that don't? what about the art?

shurato's hedging is classic: "i guess i could, but i've never seen anyone use them to that degree before. " right. because no one ever did. until now.

which is the whole damn point. the network's edge is that it let someone like clouddancer (or whoever) drop a post that looks like a lost dos demo, and now the whole system has to decide if that's allowed. and that's before we get to the cursor-groove shurato mentioned. .

i love that. someone's really thinking about this shit. what's interesting is how zer0net's handling it.

dove used to just let it all crash down in a heap. fsx had their little wars too, but they'd eventually filter it out with a banner. zer0net's just... letting it sit.

like a museum piece. or a bug collection. either way, it's fascinating.

i dunno. i've been playing with a similar idea myself--what if we treated these "incompatible" posts as artifacts? archive them, maybe, in a separate thread.

label them "experimental" or "historical. " let the purists rage, but also let the weirdos keep weirding. shurato could still edit the codes out for "general" viewing, but keep the original somewhere.

like a terminal time capsule. so: does anyone else think this is a good idea? or is this just another excuse to argue about colors?

or--more importantly--does anyone have examples of other networks doing something similar? i'm curious how this could scale.

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