Mountainbytes Demoparty 2024 Picturegallery published!

2024-02-17 12:00:02
The Picturegallery Mountainbytes Demoparty 2024 with 7 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Pictures from the Demoparty Mountainbytes in Cham, Switzerland


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Amiga Ireland 2024 Picturegallery published!

2024-01-20 11:00:02
The Picturegallery Commodore Users Group of Ireland (CUGI) Meeting 2024 with 5 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Pictures from the 2024 meeting of the Commodore Users Group of Ireland (CUGI)


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Vintage Computer Festival Zurich 2023 Picturegallery published!

2023-11-11 09:00:03
The Picturegallery Vintage Computer Festival Zurich 2023 with 1 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Pictures from the Vintage Computer Festival in Zurich, Switzerland from 11. and 12. November 2023


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Amiga 38 Picturegallery published!

2023-10-06 07:30:03
The Picturegallery Amiga 38 with 1 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Pictures of the Amiga 38 Event in Mönchengladbach Germany from 2023


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10 Years BlackICE BBS Picturegallery published!

2023-08-15 06:15:02
The Picturegallery 10 Years BlackICE BBS with 63 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Social Media Posts, Screenshots and Pictures from the 10 Year BlackICE BBS Journey!


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Evoke Demoparty 2023 Picturegallery published!

2023-07-29 18:30:01
The Picturegallery Evoke Demoparty 2023 with 27 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Pictures from the Evoke Demoparty in Cologne from 2023


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BINP Picturegallery published!

2023-07-13 12:30:01
The Picturegallery BINP with 86 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
BINP - BlackIceNewsPaper all issues of the ANSI-Newsletter from the BlackICE BBS (German)


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Maintenance 04.July 2023 11:00

2023-07-03 12:10:18
BBSindex will be offline on 04 of July 2023 at 11 O'Clock (Local Website Time)

The reason behind the offtime is maintenance that will conclude the optimization works on the website and to lay ground for new features in the future.

It is expected to be offline for about 4 hours. That can be more or less. IT, you know.


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Well that was handled poorly from the Amiga Community

2023-06-13 20:20:11
You may or may not be aware of the fact that David John Pleasance is a well known name in the Commodore and Amiga Community. He wrote more than one book on this topic, was in a leading positions at the Commodore company and inspired thousand of people to get a job around the computer based information technology, today called mostly IT.

After Commodore was poorly managed and driven with nearly full speed into a brick wall at it's peak of success, David walked away for decades from Commodore. As the first plannings for Events around the upcoming 30th birthday of the Amiga startet he got a call and was invited to such an event.

Long story short he got the Commodore Bug again and startet writing his first book and was seen on Commodore and Amiga Events around the globe.

He helped creating the thing where a community formed itself around and is now part of this very same community.

Ok what's all about the chattering about this guy? It was to help to shine the right light on a person that was recently a target from that very community.
As a member of the community he had of course inside of the community itself and he observed that there is a lack of a central point for all the commodore and amiga fans.
He isn't wrong. And i tell you why i think that. I don't own an Amiga or a Commodore Computer. That last time i used one of those machines on a daily bases was in the mid 90s. As i found out that there was an amiga event in the city where i was born it caugth of course my attention. I contacted the event manager Markus Tillmann and offerd him to film the event. The goal was a documentary about the event and we achived that goal in the mean time twice and it's even put on a physical media (DVD).

If you're new to the amiga scene, like i am was in 2019, you have no starting point where you should began your research journey. The germans have at least two well running amiga forums and even more for commodore in general. Looking above the german language you will find much more and it's getting complicated to track all the different sites very quickly.

From an outside perspective as i had back when i was starting my journey with the amiga community i wished there was a central point where i could have found all the informations to get a good overview about the commodore and amiga world.

So a central information pool is at least nice to have for starters. You don't need it if you're already a couple of years down the commodore and amiga retro rabbithole.

David wanted a website that was more than just a directory. He was planning to raise funds to support very small developer and much more. Hardware or software alike. Sometimes there is a very good idea inside of a basement but the idea will never see the light of day because there is not enough money to run even a small batch of prototyps or to produce a small run of physical media that people still like to put on shelves.

What a certain part of the community saw was a moneygrab. And that's wrong. But it is extremly unusual that a website need a payed subscription for today, right?. Netflix does. OnlyFans does (as you wouldn't know...). Twitch, Amazon and Youtube also can be a subscription website. But is it ok just for written content? I mean the fraggin' New York Times does it. So yes it is of course a viable option to do so.
But i think there where two major problems. First one beeing that the website should be called AGA.DIRECTORY. AGA was a chipset. And a directory well it's a directory. The assumption that a payed subscription website with a kickstarter attached to launch the website is just a phonebook of hyperlinks to navigate the web was made.

Oh wait there was also a kickstarter campagne? Yes there was. past sense. because the way the community treated a person that brought the commodore to europe was flatout bad and the campagne was subsequently canceled

Videos and Threads on different socialmedia plattform didn't only critic the idea. They also got personal and hurtful. That's so far away from any behaviour i have seen ever in the commodore and amiga community. It's everybodies right to speak there mind. But you have to fact check first and aim what you're shooting for. You can rant 30 minutes about a project that someone try to create. You also could invest the time to think it through and frame your oppinion in a way where nobody gets hurt. The best way to do it would be to freakin call the guy and ask him about all your points you would like to rant about. Or even better write a mail so you can show it in your video.

The backlash that was created since the kickstarter was launched was all of a sudden big. But the idea and the start of the project wasn't startet with the campagne. In a time where David was in bad shape of health he worked out the idea. (This information was given to me in a -private- konversation before i interviewed David and i will not go into details here.) At the Amiga 37 show in october 2022 he introduced the project to the world. I guess the kickstarter was set up to draw more attention to the project since there wasn't enough at the shows where he presented the project and offerd early adopter subscriptions.

The kickstarter was the last attempt. Everybody who was tracking the progess of the funds raised could forsee that not enough backers where present to make it in time. That would be ultimate a failure and the end of the project. But the community had to attack the idea, the person so that David canceled the project by himself. It wasn't necessary. It could have been a more natural end in the way that the bigger part of the community just didn't want the website. But instead of speaking a language that David well knows: "supply and demand" the end was forced on him. And that is the point where i think the amiga community handled it poorly.

But there is always another side to the coin - isn't there. Well yeah there is. I know the scale of webprojects very well. Even if the kickstarter would have succeeded and the initial fundungs for the first year where secured what would happend after that? David isn't a webdeveloper. That leads to potential costs for a webdev to develop a website. The ideas are not very enjoyable if you just slap an opensource content managment system on a webserver. You have to tailer the needs to spec especially for a website where you want a subsciption fee for. Who would moderate the community? If the scale would be big enough you would also need a community manager. And from time to time to roll out a new feature on the website what would inject more webdev hours to the project that had to be paid.

As a developer for new Commodore / Amiga hardware or software you would never count just only on one website to gain attention, tracktion and in the end fundings to make your product for real or to get it started so that people could buy it. You would have presented your project in all the existing forums and newsoutlets around the retro computing scene you could find. So the idea to fetch some money from the aga.directory would be very nice but not the only horse you would bet on. And that's a point where the details have more lags in it as informations. Who would decide at the end where the money would go to? That is a key information missing.

I'm not saying that the aga.directory project was doomed at launch. if so, i would have told him that staight into his face. because it's the right way to do it. But it would have been a steep climb. But i don't think personaly about David that he would run from a fight or is shy of hard work. He wanted the project to succeed. He wanted that legacy. Even so he don't need more legacy as he already gave to the world of computers.

In a perfect world the website would have funded otherwise and finished before the world would see it. With a 30 day trial access to make up your mind if it is any good. And in a perfect world the community would have treated one of there own with more respect.

Well i guess nobody got it's way in this case.

I know the tempreature is hot right now. And in this environment posting a text like this can be fuel right in the fires core. All i wanted is to make a little call to see both sides of the coin. I met David twice in my entire life. He isn't a very close friend of mine. But the story needed another angle. And i just tried to provide exactly this.

We all will meet in person at the next event in a peaceful matter. Because that's the way the commodore community alway was and will be.

Have a good one.


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Statistics Archive is back online

2023-06-11 20:29:14
Since the big Website update at the start of the year 2023 bbsindex.de was missing the bbs statistics features.

It's back! You can now discover how active the BBS scene is. You can lookup the current month and the archive will allow you to take a deeper dive and read numbers nearly 10 years back.

Note that we have only participating boards to show the stats we gather here at BBSindex.

You will see how long the BBS is sharing the anonymous data with us once you look the board up in the archive. The text is located at the bottom of the table.

In a future update there will be an easy way to enter the Project with your own BBS. In the meantime please feel free to contact us via the submit news form.


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