I was laughing with an old friend about some of the antics we used to pull as sysops back in the day, and was wondering if you guys had any similar stories.

For example - do you remember when Call Forwarding first came out? For BBSs that weren't in large cities but located in butt-phUck-nowhere, finding a decent calling base was difficult. Similarly, for those stranded out in the boonies, finding a BBS to dial into without incuring staggering long distance fees was a challenge.

Along came call forwarding, and it became a fantastic way to broaden your local calling region. Finding BBS users in the right "middle" locations that
were willing to install a 2nd line for the sole purpose of a call forwarding leap station (paid for by the sysop, and granting free access to the BBS of course) prooved quite easy, and before long you had a huge spider web of local connection numbers.

In the beginning you could even daisy chain call forward stations, and unlimited numbers of connections would be passed through!

But then Bell started to catch on to what was happening, and started to phUck with us by blocking multiple connections - once a call was forwarded through, a busy signal would be presented to future callers.

Through trial and error it was discovered that by disabling call forwarding (*70 or whatever it was at the time) then re-enabling it, another call could be passed through! Not as convenient to be forced to use a crappy computer running a script to disable/re-enable CF each time a call passed through, but still worth it!

Bell then started to attempt to monetize the number of connections passed through, so you would pay for the number of PSTN connections you wanted/needed.
But what was this we noticed? At one of our call forwarding nodes we couldn't find a bbs user willing to install a 2nd line, so we ended up just buying a car phone (bag phone, whatever those early cell phone things were) and call forwarding on that. For whatever reason, Bell hadn't "closed the door" on the unlimited pass through connections for mobile units so that bought us another half year or so for cheap pass through options :)

I'll never forget the time I dialed into my car-phone account to check on monthly usage... the automated voice garbled (very robotic back in the day) "You have used 9 thousand.. 700 minutes this month....
your current bill is one hundred and twenty dollars"
(or something ridiculous like that... it was for one of our busiest connecting nodes, located in Breslau Ontario which was local to both Kitchener/Waterloo and Guelph - allowing Guelph callers to dial into our BBS in KW for a local call)

Oh the fun times we had... did anyone else have creative ways to "get the job done" as cheap as possible? I'd love to hear them :)

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Re: phUn with Bell back in the day...
By: Crushed to All on Mon Sep 23 2024 12:43 pm

For example - do you remember when Call Forwarding first came out? For BBSs

I worked at a software company where one of the developers set up a FirstClass server to collaborate with a remote team that was in local toll territory - some of the most expensive calls at the time.

He didn't understand store-and-forward technologies. He set our side to poll every 10 minutes. 24 hours a day. To the tune of a couple of hundred dollars a month. I couldn't convince him that crash polling would work as well, and he was willing to eat the cost.

I spoke to my phone line broker who asked if I didn't mind bending the rules a bit. Sure, I said. He asked me to order call forward busy on my line. Call forward it to the remote end. Then, call MYSELF. The call goes xfer on busy to the destination, for the cost of message units instead of a toll call.
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