In the ye old days of the BBS server, DNS hadn't been invented yet. If you wanted to go somewhere you had to write down the phone number and it's name. Also, the further you dialed, the more you paid in phone bills. This ultimately led to the local BBS.

A local BBS was run by your 'local sysop' and featured a low cost place you and friends could dial in and play doors on. However, the local BBS can get dull after a few minutes when you've caught up on email, forum, and chats. People wanted to dial in elsewhere.

The BBS List was born, and most BBS servers feature one. It's just a big directory of places you can go, and some BBS servers offered cross-connection to get there. The fun part? BBS lists were solely user-compiled, there was no global masterlist if you will.

A BBS was added in one of 3 ways:
1. A Sysop added it as part of some higher agreement
2. A user(could have been a sysop) wanted to keep it for their and others references
3. A user dialed in to a BBS and left a traceback to their local BBS, so others could visit them as well.

Nowadays, I tend to leave my presence on most BBSs I dial into, and I encourage you to please add GlitchNet to any interested BBS servers you find. Recently, I've just put on telnetbbsguide.com, a web repository, as well as vertrauen, which is the synchronet "global" list. If you find us anywhere else, I encourage you to figure out who put us there.
https://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html - Vertrauen BBS listing webclone

Happy dialing,

- Your local Sysop, _ _ _ _____ ____ ______
Faithful till the end, | | | | | | | ____|___ |____ |
__ _ _ __ ___ ___ _ __ | |_ _ _ _ __| |_| | ___| |__ __) | / /
/ _` | '__/ _ \/ _ | '_ \| __| | | | '__| __| |/ _ |___ \ |__ < / /
| (_| | | | __| __| | | | |_| |_| | | | |_| | __/___) |___) |/ /
\__, |_| \___|\___|_| |_|\__|\__,_|_| \__|_|\___|____/|____//_/
__/ | CEO of Glitch Technoloigies LLC, Most Loyal Sysop of the Year,
|___/ Owner of Wii Club, Calculator Programmer, C Dev