A better drop file for BBS doors

BBSDEV.DRP is a small, line-oriented format for handing a live BBS session to a door. It retains the easy sequential parsing of classic drop files while specifying the details they left ambiguous: UTF-8 text, absolute logoff time, terminal geometry and encoding, stable user identity, modern I/O mechanisms, and forward-compatible versioning.

Read the specification

View the ABNF grammar

Version 1.0 at a glance

• Exactly 19 positional lines and no secret credentials
• Discovery through the BBSDEV_DRP absolute-path environment variable
• UTF-8 file content with an explicitly named terminal character set
• Optional UTC RFC 3339 deadline instead of a drifting “minutes remaining” value
• Screen dimensions, ANSI, RIP, CTerm revision, and BCP 47 language
• Portable sysop and cosysop roles alongside BBS-native numeric levels
• Local console, standard I/O, clean sockets, POSIX and Windows serial, direct DOS UART, and FOSSIL communication modes
• Monotonically extensible minor versions and explicit rejection of incompatible majors

1.0
stdio

Example User
550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000
80
25
Y
N
1.332
2026-08-29T20:00:00Z
IBM437
en-US
Synchronet 3.21
Example Board
Example Sysop
90
1
Y

Project links

• Source repository
• Canonical examples
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• Open or review a pull request

Implementations and proposals are welcome. Please use an issue for design discussion and a pull request for concrete specification changes or additional conformance examples.