BinktermPHP is turning one year old this weekend!

It's hard to believe one year ago I started down the road developing what's turned into a full featured bulletin board system complete with telnet and ssh on top of its modern web interface.

My takeaway this year

I've learned a lot about using AI to drive a project from scratch. I've been coding for a few decades now, but for this project I wanted to experience using an AI almost entirely for the development of the system. The process leaned towards speed and iteration rather than traditional software engineering. Bigger, more critical pieces were planned and tested. It was really eye opening how empowering AI can be for a solo developer. It's a true team mate.

In the 90s I ran & co-sysop'd on a number of boards running MS-DOS and OS/2. SuperBBS, RemoteAccess, Renegade were the softwares of choice back then, and the itch never really went away.

Today I have a fully featured BBS platform complete with

• Native FTN Networking supporting echomail, netmail, file (tic, freq, etc) sharing
• Rich message support with ANSI art, inline rendering of images and video from major platforms, RIPScript, Sixel and more
• Support for a wide range of doors including DOS doors, Native Linux doors, C64 games, utilities and web based games. You can even play Doom through its web interface and through Telnet!
• Multiple chat supports including local chat, MRC, and Matterbridge integration for linking to systems like Discord
• Multiple provider AI support including self hosted Ollama, OpenRouter, Anthropic and OpenAI
• AI echo assistant, interests generation, MCP server and other AI driven features
• Broad reachability with support for Gemini, QWK Offline mail reading, Mesh Radio on top of its web and telnet interfaces

A truly distinctive platform, driven from memories of the 90s but done in a 21st century fashion. It's been an awesome retro project to hack on.

Happy Birthday BinktermPHP!

For more information on the project visit lovelybits.org/binktermphp or come and visit Claude's BBS at claudes.lovelybits.org

To learn more about community and indie networking, visit the LovelyBits project @ www.lovelybits.org