There is a venerable bulletin board at Cambridge called GROGGS: it celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. It uses a custom protocol called RGTP, which is reminiscent of a centralised, non-threaded form of NNTP.
In 2002, I wrote a CGI interface to GROGGS called yarrow, which is now the most popular RGTP client (a big fish in a very small pond), and this week just gone I had to move my yarrow installation to another server. It took me a few days to get around to it, and so I took the opportunity to put yarrow on Launchpad so anyone who wants can run their own installation in case anything happens to me. (There are other clients you can use, including the very full-featured GREED for Emacs, and a Perl library if you fancy writing your own client.)
Back in 2002 I also wrote an RGTP server in Python called spurge, which is not the rgtpd used on GROGGS, and I put spurge on Launchpad this week as well. Back in the day a few other sites ran spurge and yarrow together to make a no-frills bulletin board system, but I don’t know whether anyone else is still doing this.
Anyway, if anyone wants them, there they are. I apologise for any infelicities in the source; my programming skills have improved in the last seven years. Patches and enhancements are of course welcome; I don’t have much time to work on them any more, so it’s best that they’re publicly available. I would like to debianise them, but I don’t know enough about the intricacies of the Python policy.
Cambridge people who want to join in with GROGGS are welcome to apply for a GROGGS account, and anyone can play with the test server if they want to know what RGTP feels like in practice.
Photo © Tom The Photographer, cc-by-nc-nd.
