Type the title of an article, and Alexandria BBS looks it up on wikipedia.org and shows it in a form a terminal can read: plain text, cut into its sections, wrapped to the screen.
Live at
teletypegames.org:2326, and in the browser on bbsweb, and through TTG Gate BBS
A Ruby app on the rubbs gem, like the Teletype BBS. It has two faces on one port:
A call starts with one question: which terminal is calling. The proxy guesses first from the telnet answers (a window wider than 40 columns is a modern terminal, 40 or no answer a C64); RETURN takes the guess, 1 picks the modern face, 2 the C64.
What you type is first looked up as a title: when Wikipedia has an article of that title, or one it redirects to (c64 → Commodore 64), it opens at once. Otherwise the search results come, best first.
An article opens with its sections: the lead under the article's title, then the main sections, their subheadings inside them. See also, References, External links and the like are left out. A formula is shown as its TeX made readable (e^(iπ)+1=0). Every article shows its address: the text is Wikipedia's, under CC BY-SA.
The languages are English and Hungarian (ALEXANDRIA_BBS_LANGUAGES, the first one is the default).
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
F2 |
Search… |
F3 |
Random article |
F4 |
Switch language |
Enter |
Open the search result |
F5 / Alt-Enter |
Full screen and back |
Esc |
Close the window |
Alt-X |
Log off |
The results window lists the titles with the matching snippet; the article window has the sections on the left and the text on the right.
Type a title at the prompt and RETURN. RETURN alone opens the menu: R random article, L language, Q log off. Results and sections are numbered lists: the number and RETURN opens one, RETURN alone turns the page, Q or ← goes back. A section stops at every screenful.
The proxy reads the MediaWiki Action API of en.wikipedia.org and hu.wikipedia.org anonymously: list=search for the results, prop=extracts (plain text) for the article, list=random for a random one, and names itself in the User-Agent, as Wikipedia asks. Results and articles are cached for 10 minutes. The C64 face writes the same text as the modern one; rubbs' PETSCII line turns it into the C64's character set (accented letters become their nearest ASCII).
A push to master deploys it from Woodpecker (ci-deploy alexandria-bbs); the container is alexandria-bbs, in /srv/stacks/alexandria-bbs.