SchemeBBS

An anonymous BBS (textboard) written in R⁵RS Scheme

News

• /mona/ is back!
• CSS dark mode added and style switcher fixed

Sat Sep 9 10:23:06 UTC 2023

• Hardware and OS upgrade (FreeBSD 12.2 -> 13.0)

Thu Dec 30 15:36:50 UTC 2021

• Emacs mode for serious /prog/riders
• Docker Image
• fossil repositories for user-contributed code
• A local archive for the ashes of our deceased forefathers, and miscellanea
• A pastebin service for longer text files (<1 MB)

Sat Jun 6 11:14:44 UTC 2020

Demo board

If you just want to try SchemeBBS, please do so in /sandbox/

Boards

• /prog/ - Programming (CS and textboard engineering discussions)
• /sol/ - Solipsisms (whatever that means, everything goes)
• https://bbs.jp.net/mona/ - Japanese Culture (clearnet)

Features

bbs.scm is a 2ch clone with the following features:

• No registration required, anonymous posting
• No cookies
• No Javascript
• No Images
• Lightweight Markup
• Serves web pages to browsers, S-expressions to LISP clients
• Stylesheet switcher
• Multi-boards
• Runs well on "el cheapo" VPS
• Optimized for text-based browsers such as Links or w3m
• Entirely written in Scheme
• Open Source

Formatting

One newline is a line break (<BR>), two or more newlines will start a new paragraph.

quoted text

;;;This is a block of code
(lambda (h)
  ((lambda (f) (f f))
   (lambda (f) (h (lambda (x) ((f f) x))))))

Alternate Access

This site is also accessible via i2p: bbs.i2p

Source Code

You can clone SchemeBBS source code repo at gitlab

A Bit of History

/prog/ was a textboard about ``programming'', hosted at world4ch.org and later dis.4chan.org. It was an odd and fascinating place that went mostly unmoderated for years. Unfortunately the owners were made to remember its existence thanks to imbecilic spammers. Without consideration for the small community that inhabited the place, the plug was finally pulled on a sad day of July 2014.

If you weren't lucky enough to have been a part of it, an archive of all the posts is available at archive.org. There's a search engine for this archive which has also been entirely restored as web pages at archive.tinychan.net.

Back then, a somewhat recurrent joke was that the BBS script, Shiichan, should be rewritten in Scheme. I'm not aware this task was ever completed. Well, it is, now. For the sake of it. Another motivation was to write some real world software in Scheme: beside implementations you won't find a lot of Scheme code in the wild. This is especially true for MIT Scheme. So, however trivial this program is, its merits are its mere existence and the fact it's been deployed.

More History

If you're interested in the history of textboards as a whole, here are a few interesting reads:

• Shii's blurb
• Tanasinn wiki
• bibanon

Other Textboard Scripts

There's a huge list of textboard softwares at Overscript.

• bbs.cgi - The original 2ch Perl script
• Shiichan - The PHP script that was used at world4ch
• Kareha - Popular Perl script used by 4-ch.net among others
• Tablecat - Tablecat's Perl script (the site is currently offline)
• Weabot - Python script used by the most active western textboard: Bienvenido a Internet

Software Stack

SchemeBBS is written in MIT/GNU Scheme, Nginx is used as a reverse proxy and the whole system runs on FreeBSD. There's no database, messages are stored as Scheme objects in plain files. This stack is lovely. Nice icons too.

Bonus Track

Listening to this tune will make you enjoy writing Scheme code.