What is this site all about?
Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2025 12:08 am
Greetings.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... We used to have things called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). Some of you might remember and some younger ones in the group might have seen videos about it and been bitten by the BBS bug already. Well, I used to run a BBS and then later ran one with my wife when we were just starting our family. The latter system was called The Information Exchange BBS. It was there that a friend of mine conceived of and developed a bridge for the QWK packet standard, which is still in use today, between FidoNet and GT-Power. Anyone who has ran a BBS or logged into them back in the day tends to look on the activities with great nostalgia. Naturally, I am no exception. I have wanted to revive some analog to the BBS of yore with a more modern equivalent. Some were into BBS downloads and some were into BBS door games. I was mostly in it for the conversations (message bases). So, for me, forums would be the more modern equivalent that I was seeking. However, even the forum formats are now considered very long-in-tooth. Unfortunately, at the time I believed setting one up from scratch was more work than I wanted to do. So, I took the easier road and set up a WordPress for the Cincinnati GMRS community. I quickly found out that maintaining a self-hosted WordPress site can be clunky and more difficult than it ought to be. I longed for a forum system. Eventually, I put out the call for someone to set something up so that I could take down the WordPress site that had been running for several years. Thankfully, WRKQ975 (Scott) stepped up. He chose another WordPress for the site; https://cincygmrs.com. This made the old server free for a forum site.
On here, there are more categories for their respective groups that are hidden from the other groups. This is for my family and their own hobbies. Since everything should be low traffic, it makes sense to purpose the system for multiple groups under the same forum software. The way things currently operate, a new, unregistered user can read-only access the GMRS General Discussion forum. Once they go through the simple registration process, they should have full access to the GMRS category Informal Net only. I must manually add users to their respective groups for those categories and forums to be visible to that specific user. So, after you register, please drop me a PM or, if that fails, post a message in the forum for me to add you to your respective group(s).
For now, the site is accessible via the new URL https://iebbs.ddns.net or the old URL https://cinicnnatigmrs.ddns.net. Eventually, the old URL will be depreciated and only the iebbs URL will be valid. For those that are wondering... The "ddns.net" is because it is self-hosted at home and uses the free service, No-IP, to redirect to the server. The choices on free URLs through No-IP are limited.
I hope y'all enjoy the forum as a place to announce and interact.
Hans
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... We used to have things called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). Some of you might remember and some younger ones in the group might have seen videos about it and been bitten by the BBS bug already. Well, I used to run a BBS and then later ran one with my wife when we were just starting our family. The latter system was called The Information Exchange BBS. It was there that a friend of mine conceived of and developed a bridge for the QWK packet standard, which is still in use today, between FidoNet and GT-Power. Anyone who has ran a BBS or logged into them back in the day tends to look on the activities with great nostalgia. Naturally, I am no exception. I have wanted to revive some analog to the BBS of yore with a more modern equivalent. Some were into BBS downloads and some were into BBS door games. I was mostly in it for the conversations (message bases). So, for me, forums would be the more modern equivalent that I was seeking. However, even the forum formats are now considered very long-in-tooth. Unfortunately, at the time I believed setting one up from scratch was more work than I wanted to do. So, I took the easier road and set up a WordPress for the Cincinnati GMRS community. I quickly found out that maintaining a self-hosted WordPress site can be clunky and more difficult than it ought to be. I longed for a forum system. Eventually, I put out the call for someone to set something up so that I could take down the WordPress site that had been running for several years. Thankfully, WRKQ975 (Scott) stepped up. He chose another WordPress for the site; https://cincygmrs.com. This made the old server free for a forum site.
On here, there are more categories for their respective groups that are hidden from the other groups. This is for my family and their own hobbies. Since everything should be low traffic, it makes sense to purpose the system for multiple groups under the same forum software. The way things currently operate, a new, unregistered user can read-only access the GMRS General Discussion forum. Once they go through the simple registration process, they should have full access to the GMRS category Informal Net only. I must manually add users to their respective groups for those categories and forums to be visible to that specific user. So, after you register, please drop me a PM or, if that fails, post a message in the forum for me to add you to your respective group(s).
For now, the site is accessible via the new URL https://iebbs.ddns.net or the old URL https://cinicnnatigmrs.ddns.net. Eventually, the old URL will be depreciated and only the iebbs URL will be valid. For those that are wondering... The "ddns.net" is because it is self-hosted at home and uses the free service, No-IP, to redirect to the server. The choices on free URLs through No-IP are limited.
I hope y'all enjoy the forum as a place to announce and interact.
Hans