What Being a SysOp Taught Me About Running Systems

40 years ago, I ran a bulletin board system from my bedroom with absolute power over 200 users - and learned lessons that $100 billion platforms still get wrong. When I was a teenage sysop, I could read anyone's private messages, ban anyone I wanted, and delete anything that offended me. Nobody talks about what that responsibility actually taught us about moderation, community, and accountability.

Updated February 2026: Added game theory framing on why BBS communities worked and the Community Health Protocol.

Modern infrastructure abstracts away the fundamentals. Cloud services hide the hardware. Scaling is someone else's problem. Support tickets go into queues. But the core challenges haven't changed - we've just added layers between ourselves and the reality of running systems. Here's what BBS sysadmin taught me that still applies.

Hardware Management: Everything Fails

When you run a BBS from your bedroom, hardware failure isn't an alert from AWS - it's a dead machine at 3am and angry users tomorrow.

Modems died constantly. Heat, power surges, lightning strikes on phone lines. I learned to keep spares. I learned to diagnose by sound - the difference between a clean handshake and a failing modem was audible. Today's equivalent: understanding your infrastructure well enough to diagnose by behavior before the monitoring catches up.

Hard drives were precious and fragile. 20MB cost hundreds of dollars. Head crashes were catastrophic. I learned backup discipline the hard way - after losing everything once, you never skip backups again. The lesson scales: your data is more important than your code. Treat it accordingly.

Every component mattered. A flaky cable could corrupt data. A power supply going bad could fry everything. You couldn't just spin up a replacement instance. You had to understand the whole system because you couldn't afford to replace any part of it. That understanding - knowing how all the pieces fit together - is worth more than any certification.

Limited Connections: Managing Scarcity

My BBS had one phone line. One user at a time. At peak, maybe a second line. This created problems that modern platforms pretend don't exist.

Queue management was real. Popular BBSs had busy signals constantly. Users would auto-dial for hours trying to connect. I experimented with callback systems - you'd request a time slot, the BBS would call you back. Primitive scheduling, but it worked.

Time limits were essential. If one user stayed on for hours, nobody else could use the system. I learned to set limits - 60 minutes per day, enforced by the software. Users hated it. But without limits, the system wasn't usable for anyone except the person already connected.

Peak hours were brutal. Evening and weekends, everyone wanted on. The technical term is "contention" - more demand than capacity. I learned to stagger popular activities, post new files during off-peak, save bandwidth-heavy operations for late night. The lesson: understand your usage patterns. Design around them.

Modern systems have functionally unlimited connections, but the principles remain. Rate limiting, queue management, resource allocation - we've scaled the numbers but not the problems.

Resource Scarcity: Ratios and Quotas

Disk space was expensive. Bandwidth (measured in phone line hours) was limited. How do you manage finite resources fairly?

Upload/download ratios. Most BBSs required users to contribute to take. Upload one file, download three. This created a self-sustaining ecosystem. Leechers - people who only took - would hit the ratio wall and have to contribute or leave.

Disk quotas. Users got a fixed amount of storage for messages and personal files. Use it wisely or lose it. This forced prioritization. What's actually important to keep?

Access levels as privilege. New users got limited access. Prove yourself reliable, get more access. Contribute to the community, get more privileges. This wasn't arbitrary - it was resource management. Trusted users could use more resources because they'd demonstrated they wouldn't abuse them.

Cloud computing made us forget that resources cost money. Infinite scaling is actually "infinite until the bill arrives." The BBS model of making costs visible and managing scarcity explicitly was more honest.

The Cost of Access

On a BBS, you had to earn your access. Upload ratio: 2:1. If you acted like a jerk, you lost your download privileges. The cost of misbehavior was high.

The Modern Failure: On Twitter/X, the cost of misbehavior is zero. You get banned? You make a new account in 3 seconds.

The Physics: You cannot have a high-trust community with zero cost of entry. Moderation isn't about "policing speech"; it's about "pricing access." Every BBS sysop understood this instinctively. The platforms that forgot it are now drowning in bots, trolls, and bad-faith actors.

The game theory is simple: when defection is free, defection dominates. When defection has a cost, cooperation becomes the rational strategy. BBSs priced defection. Modern platforms subsidize it.

People Gaming the System

The moment you have resources worth having, people will try to get them without paying the cost. BBS culture had its own category of exploits. Even in the golden age of door games, players found creative ways to bend the rules.

Ratio hackers. Upload garbage files to inflate your ratio. Upload tiny files marked as large ones. Upload the same file under different names. The arms race between SysOps and ratio gamers was constant.

Account sharing. One person builds up access, shares credentials with friends. Five people using one account that only earned privileges for one person's contribution level.

Time limit evasion. Disconnect and reconnect to reset the timer. Use multiple accounts. Call from different phone numbers to avoid detection.

Leech tactics. Promise to upload later, never do. Claim files are corrupted to get re-downloads without ratio hit. Social engineering other users into sharing accounts.

Every exploit taught me something about incentive design. If a rule can be gamed, it will be gamed. The question isn't whether people will try to exploit your system - they will. The question is whether your system's incentives make exploitation harder than legitimate use.

Modern platforms have the same problems at larger scale. Fake accounts, bot manipulation, referral fraud, trial abuse. The tactics change; the motivations don't.

Security Before Security Existed

There was no industry standard for BBS security. No frameworks. No compliance requirements. Just whatever the SysOp figured out:

Callback verification. User calls in, provides a phone number, BBS hangs up and calls them back. Proves you're actually at that number. Primitive two-factor authentication.

Access levels. New users see nothing sensitive. Trusted users get more access. System operators get full access. The principle of least privilege, implemented in 1987 BBS software.

Audit logs. Every action logged. Every file access, every message read, every login attempt. Not for compliance - for forensics. When something went wrong, you needed to know what happened.

Known-user networks. FidoNet nodes vouched for each other. Unknown systems couldn't join without introduction from a trusted node. Web of trust, before the term existed.

The security industry has formalized these concepts, but they're not new. Defense in depth, principle of least privilege, audit logging, trust networks - BBS SysOps were implementing them with BASIC code and determination.

The SysOp as Absolute Authority

On a BBS, the SysOp's word was law. There was no appeals process. No corporate policy. No algorithm to blame. If I banned you, you were banned. If I deleted your messages, they were deleted.

This power was terrifying. I could read anyone's private messages. I could modify any file. I could impersonate any user. The technical capability to abuse power was total.

The restraint was cultural. SysOps who abused their power got reputations. Word spread through FidoNet. Users would leave for better-run boards. The community enforced norms that no code could. Georgetown research on BBS moderation found that content moderation was viewed more as community formation than balancing censorship and free speech.

Transparency helped. I posted my policies. I explained moderation decisions. When I made mistakes, I admitted them publicly. The power imbalance was so extreme that the only viable path was earned trust.

Modern platforms have the same power - they can see everything, modify anything, ban anyone. But they pretend they don't. They hide behind algorithms and policies and "community guidelines." The honest version was better: "I run this place. Here are my rules. Don't like it, leave." I wrote more about the structural advantages of BBS communities that made this accountability work.

Community Building When You Knew Everyone

My BBS had maybe 200 active users. I knew most of them by name. I knew their real-world identities, their phone numbers (callback verification revealed them), their patterns of behavior.

Moderation was personal. When someone was being disruptive, I could call them. Literally pick up the phone and talk to them. "Hey, you're being a jerk in the message bases. What's going on?" Usually something was happening in their real life. The problematic behavior stopped.

Reputation was persistent. You couldn't just create a new account and start fresh. New accounts required callback verification, and I recognized phone numbers. Your history followed you. This changed behavior - people were more careful when actions had lasting consequences. IEEE Spectrum notes that some BBSes developed creative verification systems, including voice calls to confirm identity.

The community was the product. People didn't use my BBS for the software - other boards had the same software. They used it for the community. The regulars. The conversations. The relationships. This meant community health was the primary metric, not growth.

At scale, this doesn't work. You can't personally know millions of users. But the principles translate: real consequences for bad behavior, persistent identity, community as value. Most platforms optimize for engagement instead, and the results are predictable.

What Modern Platforms Got Wrong

Watching platforms scale, I see patterns that BBS culture knew were mistakes:

Anonymous by default. Pseudonymity is fine - I went by handles too. But modern platforms make creating new identities trivially easy. No barrier, no verification, no persistence. This enables the hit-and-run behavior that destroys communities.

Algorithms instead of judgment. BBS moderation was slow and human. Modern moderation is fast and algorithmic. The algorithms are gameable. They create perverse incentives. They can't understand context. They optimize for metrics, not community health.

Scale as goal. BBSs were sized for their communities. A board with 200 engaged users was successful. Modern platforms treat any limit on growth as failure. But communities don't scale infinitely - they degrade. The optimal size is smaller than investors want to hear.

Abstraction of responsibility. SysOps were responsible for their boards. Visibly, personally responsible. Modern platforms diffuse responsibility across policies, algorithms, trust & safety teams, legal departments. Nobody is responsible, which means nobody is accountable.

Engagement over health. Controversy generates engagement. Outrage generates engagement. Toxicity generates engagement. BBS SysOps optimized for community health because we lived in those communities. We'd see the same people tomorrow. Modern platforms optimize for time-on-site and don't face the consequences.

Lessons That Still Apply

Forty years later, running systems still requires:

Understanding your infrastructure. Not just what the dashboard says, but how things actually work. What can fail. What the failure modes are. What you'll do when they happen.

Managing scarcity honestly. Resources cost money. Pretending they don't creates problems. Making costs visible creates better behavior.

Designing for gaming. People will exploit any system. Design assuming they will. Make legitimate use easier than exploitation.

Accepting responsibility. Someone has to be accountable. Diffusing responsibility doesn't eliminate it - it just makes accountability impossible.

Optimizing for the right thing. Engagement metrics aren't community health. Growth numbers aren't sustainability. Know what you're actually trying to achieve.

Platform Moderation Audit

How well does your platform price defection? Check what applies.

"Running a BBS from my bedroom taught me more about systems than any course or certification. Hardware fails. Resources are finite. People game systems. Power requires restraint."