Statistics

Data collected 2026-03-13

  • BBSes responding: 1159

  • Unique protocol fingerprints: 133

  • BBS software detected: 942 (100 unique packages)

  • FidoNet (EMSI) detected: 48

These statistics reflect the most recent scan of all servers in the bbslist.txt input list. Each server is probed using telnetlib3, which connects to each address, performs Telnet option negotiation, and captures the login banner.

The charts below summarize data from all responding servers.

BBS Software

Pie chart showing the distribution of detected BBS software packages across all responding servers.

BBS software detected from login banners.

Encoding Distribution

Pie chart showing the distribution of character encodings across all servers.

Character encoding distribution (default: CP437).

CHARSET

The default encoding of Telnet is the system locale, usually UTF-8. By strict compliance, without negotiation of BINARY transmission all protocol text should be limited to 7-bit ASCII. The encoding used should be negotiated by CHARSET.

Any server capable of negotiating CHARSET or LANG through NEW_ENVIRON is also presumed to support BINARY, regardless of its response to the BINARY telnet option. In practice, many servers transmit 8-bit data without negotiating either mode.

Pie chart showing the proportion of servers that negotiate the CHARSET telnet option.

68 of 1159 servers negotiate CHARSET (5.9%).

BINARY

Pie chart showing the proportion of servers that negotiate the BINARY telnet option.

565 of 1159 servers negotiate BINARY (48.7%).

Telnet Option Negotiation

Grouped bar chart comparing how many servers offer versus request each Telnet option during negotiation.

Telnet options offered vs requested by servers during negotiation.

Server Locations

Pie chart showing the geographic distribution of servers by country.

Server locations by country.