SysOps who have used Phoenix, Wildcat or Spitfire BBS software... why?

I haven't used those software packages myself, but I know there is a community of Wildcat (and WIN Server) sysops still active. Also, Santronics Software still licenses the software, though from stories I read they don't seem particularly interested in hobby BBSes so they may be focusing on a corporpate customer base.

There is a "Wildcat-Winserver SysOPs" Discord server, there's 2-3 dozen people on that server, a few people have been working on a project to run multinode Wildcat on Raspberry Pi (the-wc4-pi-project) using DOSBox-X and a shared network drive. (that's been particularly interesting to me since it's similar to my own network setup to run Maximus multinode)

I'm not sure what the specific draw to Wildcat is, but it's enough to keep a community around, which is great to see!


Chris/akacastor

--- Maximus 3.01
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Re: Phoenix/Spitfire/Wildcat
By: AKAcastor to Boxoskulz on Tue Jul 09 2024 11:12 am

Santronics Software still licenses the software, though from stories I read they don't seem particularly interested in hobby BBSes so they may be focusing on a corporpate customer base.

Who is even running a corporate BBS these days? Maybe their software does something more than running a BBS?

I'm not sure what the specific draw to Wildcat is, but it's enough to keep a community around, which is great to see!

Although I never ran Wildcat, it always seemed to be like a very capable BBS package. Also, I remember a lot of Wildcat BBSes I used in the 90s looking basically the same, or very similar.. It seemed like one of those BBS packages where many of its sysops didn't customize the menus very much.

Nightfox
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On 08 Jul 2024, ogg said the following...

I've still got my single node Wildcat 4 software in the original box. I ran it in the mid '90's and enjoyed it. However, when I started back
up, I refused to pay the upgrade fee that was required. I'm happy with Mystic (for the most part!)

Count me in on what you just said! I ran WC5 2 line and bought the yearly upgrade for it back in the day along with spending another few hundred bucks on wcReports, and wcBasic (or whatever it was called) when I was putting back up my BBS in 2018, I looked online to see if I could upgrade and emailed the company, got back an email saying what I owned and since it was so old it would be $200 to upgrade to the latest version, then another I think $350 to give me another 16 lines or some crazy number. Do I need 16 lines? No, but I have brought in at one time 12 users on a Amiga BBS when I did a release party, so a 2 line BBS would not work. I ended up going with Mystic and have been extremely happy with it..


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Although I never ran Wildcat, it always seemed to be like a very capable BBS package.

I remember all [most] of the paid-BBSes running Mustand, Wildcat!, MajorBBS...

Who is even running a corporate BBS these days? Maybe their software
does something more than running a BBS?

... back in the 80s/90s I remember some CITIES and gov agencies were using Mustang for their public relations sites... not saying that any are now, but I think there must have been some corporate holdouts over the decades. I'm sure they all stopped being that holdout 20 years ago, but I could imagine SOMEONE was using BBS software far after the BBS times.



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