History of The Adept BBS

The Adept BBS is a Worldgroup BBS based in Louisville, KY. We first went online in 1992 running MajorBBS software. When it came out, we upgraded to Worldgroup 1.0, then 2.0.

From the beginning, the teleconference was the most popular area of the board. It wasn’t unusual to see 10-15 people in there chatting away. Even more so when the tele games came around. Farwest trivia was a huge hit with our members. They’d spend hours in the tele playing trivia.

In the games section, Tradewars was a big draw. There were some great games over the years and some good friendships were formed from alliances made in the game. People would regularly sit in the teleconference, jump into TW and use their turns or respond to a distress signal, then return to the tele for hours on end.

We were also one of the original MajorMUD beta sites and are still listed on the Information screen in the game. This made a change in the BBS dynamic. Since there weren’t any kind of limitations, players would spend hours in the game, hanging with friends and playing in groups with other players. When scripting became widespread, most of the socialization in the game went away and players were just afk scripting. All of this led to the other games and teleconference falling away, and everyone just scripting MajorMUD.

In 2001, our server died and as the membership was dropping, we could no longer justify the costs of replacing equipment, and the expensive monthly phone lines (telnet wasn’t really a thing yet), we made the hard decision to let it go. But I always held out hope that we could bring it back online someday and kept all the documentation and activation codes.

In 2008, with the availability of broadband internet, we were able to come back online as a telnet only board. We upgraded from the DOS based WG 2.0 to Windows 3.2 and then 3.3. Most of the old games were still available and within a few months, we had a solid base of callers. Most were MajorMUD scripters, but it still kept the board alive.

We’ve recently upgraded our system from Worldgroup 3.3 to the newest developed version, renamed Major BBS v10. And while many of our original games are no longer available, we still feature MajorMUD, Tradewars, Tournament LORD, Swords of Chaos, Tele-arena, Worldlink Teleconference, and many others.