🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <FmmPXB1w165w@1776.COM> bob@1776.COM (Robert Coe) writes:
|Can't you just TELL your users that at certain (or even
|random) times you take the system down for various housekeeping tasks and
|that the phone won't answer during those times?  Or is it considered horse-
|shit to reveal such secrets to users?

It's no secret to hogbbs users that the BBS will poll for netnews and
then process it at random times.  [Well, pseudo-random; at two set
times and then whenever someone posts or sends email...]  However, it's
also no secret that hogbbs's hardware is getting awfully old, and is
subject to random lockups, often at the Awaiting Call...

If hogbbs didn't answer the phone, would you bother to keep trying?
Maybe it's processing a couple of megs of news and will be coming back
online in 10 minutes.  Maybe it's locked and will come back online when
I come home and notice it.

If I make the phone busy while it's processing, then it's almost a
certainty that if it doesn't answer the phone, it's crashed, and you
shouldn't bother attack-dialing.

  Bill