Over the past month I've been tinkering with a way to parse QWK packets and make sense of posts from my old BBS. I also wondered if there were other QWK packets floating around, and found a few posted here on r/bbs. I have 4 total datasets parsed with my custom script, and presented on my website BBSviz. Star of Life BBS - Clinton, Connecticut | 1993 [found here] and [here] Yet Another BBS - Carnegie Mellon University | 1992-1994 [found here] Big Boy's BBS - Denver, CO | 1991-1992 (Kind Bud conference) [found here] aLTER rEALITY BBS | 1989-1991 [found here] Black Lodge BBS - Phoenix, AZ | 1995 [found in a box of floppies in 2010]
After hitting 1.0 I decided to do a mini-project to create a set of 50 users modeled after the Black Lodge BBS message base / conference list as "POC Data | 2026". It took a while to get the threads to branch out somewhat like a real BBS would be. Most of the posts are nonsense, and I couldn't quite get the quote patterns to replicate very well. Check out the Story Board for something interesting.
I have several visualization pages completed so far, and I decided to release what I have and seek feedback on what others may find interesting when browsing through historical archives. 1.0 Featured Pages:
The key thing you will want to do is pick a dataset and go to "Time Machine". Click "Auto Detect" near the date picker and it will select the ranges of the first and last post. There's lots of links to other pages from the data. Sometimes it takes a few refreshes to get data to show up correctly when swapping between datasets.
BBSviz - Time Machine
Discover is just a simple keyword search, which links to other pages.
BBSviz - Discover
Thread Galaxy leverages the custom SQLite database I generated from the message lists through my custom parser written in Python.
BBSviz - Thread Galaxy
Quote-Tree Explorer offers a nested reply view
BBSviz - Quote-Tree Explorer
Handle Atlas shows who talked to who, how much, and how often they posted, and where.
BBSviz - Handle Atlas
Board DNA lets you compare different metrics across different messages bases / conferences.
https://preview.redd.it/luojo970pzjg1.png?width=937&format=png&auto=webp&s=9e72e4c9d5f77c6d5a7abb591cd6385bc7bd2388
Conference Lens lets you sort through messages filtered by message base / conference.
https://preview.redd.it/anetdb8epzjg1.png?width=1632&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0d205850c224757ad6d408f2a23a3c822dabcc6 submitted by /u/Stettin [link] [comments]