/alleycat/ - Alleycat BBS (cat scratch fever)

No shitposting.

If you want to post lewd or obnoxious material, there are plenty of NSFW boards on 8kun which will allow you to do that. If you don't have something intelligent to contribute then please have the courtesy to shut the fuck up.

Images or embeds must be relevant and annotated

It is NOT okay to post an image or embed a video without an explanation of what it is or why it is relevant to the conversation. This kind of "hit-and-run" posting clutters up the page and can make a thread take longer to load.

This especially applies to video embeds. Please respect other people's time by explaining why you think your video is worth viewing.

Your post will be removed if I think that it is a waste of time and space.

No censorship but the rules will be strictly enforced

I will not engage in censorship on this board. I respect the right for you to speak your mind. I do not care what you write. I only draw the line when you are clearly just shilling or otherwise attempting to derail a conversation (shitposting not allowed).

I understand that there is plenty of room for misinterpretation. In such a case where I am unsure of your intent then I may post a warning.

Frivolous threads may be deleted

New threads will be held to a high standard. You are free to post whatever image you feel is appropriate. You must clearly explain your chosen topic beyond a simple sentence or question. Supporting evidence or citations should be provided as needed. The point of starting a thread is to begin a conversation. The burden is on you and not on others to make an intelligent argument.

Please contribute to your own thread

Do not start a thread and then just disappear, leaving others to carry on the conversation. You started it and it is only fair that you stick it out. Of course, nobody expects you to nurture a thread which has clearly died.

As the thread creator, you make the rules. If you want to allow shitposting then make it clear in your opening post and I will abide. That is, if you wish to tell me to butt out then please do so and I will leave the thread to its fate. Sound fair?

Archiving will depend on quality or currency

Old threads will be deleted if they are no longer interesting. Well, since this board is still brand new, there is no point elaborating on this. When the time comes, I will make a better policy.

Why is this board called Alleycat BBS?

The name comes from an old project I started in 1981 called "Alleycat BBS". This is of nostalgic value to me.

The Alleycat BBS (Bulletin Board System) has disappeared into the fog of history. Nothing can be found about it in any archive. It was small with just 200 to 300 users. The computer which hosted it was also small. It was an Ohio Scientific Superboard with 8K of memory (later upgraded), a one-Mhz 6502 CPU and a 300-baud modem with a home-made phone pickup device. The code was written with a home-brew OS and a very basic machine code assembler. The service ran for three years and enjoyed a solid reputation. The name "Alleycat" was fondly regarded and, no doubt, persists in the minds of its former users. It seems only fitting to bring the name back to life.

The term "Bulletin Board System" has fallen out of favour over the years. While the boards of today are certainly more sophisticated than the boards from the 1980's, there is little difference in terms of the intended function. Posting messages and replying to messages is a tradition that goes back to the stone age of computers.

Listen up, Toadstools!

Here are the archive links to my previous work on the defunct 8chan board "Cancer General". Why I did all this is a good question and I'm not really sure I have an answer. It was an experiment and I suppose I learned some interesting lessons. It remains to be seen what I will do with this new board though I have to say -- it is fucking nice to be back!

https://archive.is/S96Kp

https://archive.is/fwYj3

https://archive.is/ha5ts

https://archive.is/ShG0r

So, my thoughts on the status of this board.

It looks like there won't be any message traffic here anytime soon. I've analyzed the state of the 8kun site as a whole and I have a few observations. First of all, there are a lot of dead boards. Some are new and appear to be nothing more than a test on the part of the board owner who has shown no interest whatsoever in providing content. It seems that these BO's think that it is not their job to create content. Unfortunately for them, the world doesn't quite work that way. The saying "build it and they will come" only applies if you actually build something. Creating a board and sitting back waiting for someone else to generate content is not "building something".

Also, many of the dead boards are resurrected from the time before 8chan went down. Plenty of content (old and very old) but nobody cares anymore. There isn't much value in retaining old content just for the sake of it. The BO's would be well advised to separate the wheat from the chaff in order to raise the value of the archive. Keep the stuff which can be considered historic or otherwise important and just delete the rest. Is that too hard? Those boards are just going to get staler by the day. Not a good way to attract new players. I see the occassional message lamenting the defunct status of what may once have been an active board. Sad to see.

The number of active boards is relatively small. They are all, or nearly all, resurrected boards, so it would seem that the audience from before the fall of 8chan may have returned to their haunts. It is hard to discern much more than that. Many of the boards appear to be more active than they really are. I mean that there are a lot of visitors (if the stats are to be believed) but little in the way of new postings. Of course, video games and politics remain the top contenders for content.

All in all, it is not a good situation for a board like this one. It is plunked in the middle of a morass of dead boards, far far away from the notice of anyone not willing to dig around. People may have already grown tired of looking after having found nothing but tumbleweeds in a vast desert.

What will happen with this board now?

Waiting around for curious people to show up and post some comments on this board would be a tragically bad policy. A sobering fact is this: there are 100 times more people who are lurkers than there are people willing to post. Yeah, I'm picking that number out of a hat but it is probably somewhere close to the truth. It is not hard to see how that is. If the ratio of posters to lurkers were any higher than about 1%, every web site on the Internet would collapse from the sheer weight of the traffic. It makes perfect sense that only 100 people may post a comment versus 10,000 who just lurk and move on. Thank God for that since I, for one, would not want to live in a world where EVERYBODY expresses their opinions. We are far better off when most people stay quiet.

I can't begin to guess how many people have already visited this board, consumed what little is here and then moved on, possibly never to return. The assumption, right or wrong, is that little will change in the forseeable future. I can't blame anyone for thinking that since there is so much competition for our attention. There is only so much time to devote to pursuing whatever it is that people are pursuing.

The only reasonable course of action on my part is to continue my policy from the time that I was doing the Toadstools threads. I don't have the exact count (you are welcome to check it out yourself) but I've linked perhaps 2000 or more videos and articles on various subjects over the course of about 10 months. That works out to about 7 links a day. That is perhaps an average of 2 to 3 links per post. I'm just guessing but this seems about right. I read dozens of articles and view perhaps as many videos per day while lurking the Internet so it isn't particularly hard for me to find content worth posting. In fact, I like to do this because it serves like sort of a private library of information worth preserving. If it is useful to others as well then that is just icing on the cake.

So what I'm saying is that I will continue to post material on this board regardless of whether I'm getting any feedback. Over time, an audience will eventually find its way to my door and that would be cool. In the meantime, I'm not going to feel sorry for myself. Fuck that. Life is too short and I've already consumed a big portion of it.

>>12