Re: gopher+ questions
On 21.07.2023 19:54, Michael Lazar wrote:
> 1. Just how popular *was* gopher+ back in '93?
>
> I've seen conflicting information on this. The gopher URL RFC 4266
> says "Historical note: Gopher+ was uncommon even when Gopher was
> popular.". However, a gophercon '94 presentation from UMN claims that
> "By December 1993 about 1/3 of gopherspace uses gopher+ servers" and
> "Bulk of the new server registrations are gopher+" [1]. Granted, UMN
> wasn't exactly an unbiased source on the matter, and I imagine a
> significant number of sysadmins were running their software. However,
> searching through code on github I can find gopher+ support was added
> to Windows and several other gopher clients.
I suppose the reasoning behind this statement is that most of the
servers of the 1990-s really used UMN gopherd, which did support gopher+
out of the box. However that does not mean they really used all the
features of gopher+ except those that work in UMN gopher default
installation (requests showing available views and metadata). But even
in the early 2000-s I could find a couple of sites with ASK forms.
>
> 3. Are there any live servers using gopher+?
>
> Besides the bare minimum to handle gopher+ protocol requests, is
> anyone filling in their +ABSTRACT attributes or presenting +ASK forms,
> or doing anything interesting with the protocol?
I used to have a demo server with UMN gopherd and all the ASK forms and
gateways that come with it as samples at www.polarhome.com free shell
provider, it's now down as the service itself is no longer active. I
hope to run a full-featured gopher+ server again though. (I think that
the security concerns of UMN gopherd are exaggerated. Mozilla/Chrome
release new versions with fixes of "critical security flaws" almost
every week, so we can expect that similar flaws do exist in the latest
version too, this does not prevent users from using this software.)
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