The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

Today's internet is largely dominated by topics and people who maximize for marginal superficial engagement. You probably won't ever have the experience of a MajorBBS sysop breaking into your session when you're in the middle of mass downloading their mounted CD content (because the disc in the drive 2 feet away from them hasn't stopped spinning for hours), trying to exploit a bug in a door game, or bruteforcing their membership payment system. That's the meaningfully deep intimacy that's missing today.

This is part of why I've loved running my .com webserver from my home desktop for the last 20+ years. I can see the blinking (and hear, and feel the vibration of) what's going on and insert in custom messages to the directory listing or other pages to talk to visitors. They can talk back by appending "/@say/Their message here." to any URL.

I do miss the old days when you could run an open netcat on a popular port and every now and then get actual messages from people exploring the internet (burried under automated scanner attempts to collect banner version strings of course).

Your comment method is so nice. Is there a reason you don't use a textarea for visitors to enter the text? Is your current method better against spambots?

It is a bit atypical because I wanted a purely static comment system for my static site. Using nginx to just log certain matching URL types to a custom log file was way safer and easier to maintain than anything written in a dynamic language accepting arbitrary internet input. I eventually adapted this approach to receiving webmentions as well and in that context I provide textarea input for webmention response URLs.

My method is not better against spam bots but it does suffer from a different type of them. For example, if a spider follows a link it sees of an existing comment, "...com/something.jpg/@say/..." then my system will interpret that as a comment. So... spam bots don't see it, but normal spiders can cause spam.

Thanks for explaining. I'm in the process of collecting interesting websites, either as a bookmark, but better yet, as an RSS feed. I can't seem to find any feed on your website!?