// what ATXbbs is, what it isn't, and how to run your own.
ATXbbs is modern bulletin-board software built to bring long-dead BBSes back to life. It reads archived threads out of the Wayback Machine, rebuilds them as a readable archive, and adds a live layer so people can post on top of the old conversations again. It's the software that powers austinspring.com.
A bulletin board system was the community internet before the web took over — people gathered in text conferences, talked in topics, and left responses. The Spring BBS ran in Austin from 1996 to 2014 with 1,000+ members across 85+ conferences. Most of it survived only in the Wayback Machine. ATXbbs exists to answer one question: can a community that scattered twenty years ago pick the conversation back up?
ATXbbs occupies a deliberately small niche: single-sysop, archive-first, no algorithm, no email required, and cheap enough to run on a $6/month box. There's no "for you" feed and no engagement-maximizing reordering — it's time-ordered or explicit filters only. If your needs are larger, Discourse is a better fit. If they're smaller, you don't need a BBS at all.
Reading is open — no account, no login. To post you create a handle and password. No email is required; email is opt-in, only for password reset and reply notifications. That's a deliberate change from the old Yapp software, which required it.
They're the vocabulary the original members actually used, kept on purpose. A conference is a subject area hosted by a volunteer. A topic is a conversation inside it. A response is a reply on a topic. Not channels, threads, and posts — conference, topic, response. The 1,000+ members of the old Spring remember those words.
"What's new since I last looked." The default view shows only topics with responses posted since your last visit. Everything else is secondary — without that one feature, a BBS feels like a graveyard. ATXbbs treats it as the whole point.
A source release is planned for v0.5, after the API surface stabilizes and after the reference deployment's official launch. If you want to revive a different defunct BBS from Wayback now, email terry@atxbbs.com and we'll work with you directly.
Yes — readability is a first-class feature, because a big share of the original membership is now 55–75. Every page ships four themes (Phosphor, Light, Sepia, High-Contrast), four font sizes up to extra-large, and a floating toggle that saves your preference per device with no account. Contrast targets WCAG AA.
The whole reference deployment lives on a $6/month droplet — no managed databases, no SaaS beyond free tiers of Resend (email) and Backblaze B2 (backups). About 95% of pages are served by nginx as plain static HTML, so it's CDN-ready and degrades gracefully.
In its own conference on the reference deployment: austinspring.com/bbs/atxbbs/. The public roadmap lives at /bbs/todo/.