News Weather and Quotes

News feeds, each caller's own weather, and stock quotes, under one item of the main menu ([N]), as CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL had them. Each part is on when its section is in the configuration.

News, weather, quotes
  [H] Headlines             [W] Your weather
  [Q] Stock quotes          [B] Back to the main menu

Sysop menus reach them with the actions news (the menu above), headlines, weather and quotes.

News feeds¶

[feeds]
contact = sysop@example.org
catalog = all

A feed's items are posted to a message area of their own, read-only (only the sysop posts), made the first time the feed is read and listed under its group. So the news is read wherever areas are: the terminals and 3270s, newsreaders (make the area a newsgroup with bbs area newsgroup), QWK packets, the web forum, gopher and Gemini. Headlines lists the news areas, each with its newest story.

An item becomes a short message: its headline, its summary as plain text, a link to the whole story, and where and when it is from. That is what feeds are published for; the BBS does not fetch the stories themselves.

Subj: AI stocks climb after trillions wiped from market values

Investors had been selling off tech shares in part due to concerns the
Democrat election victory would mean slower AI development.

The whole story:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c35ynnpzdq51o

-- BBC News, Fri 6 Nov 2026 21:06 UTC

RSS 0.9x to 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), Atom and JSON Feed are read, in any character set. Each feed is read every every minutes (with a little jitter, and less often after failures or when the site asks with Retry-After), and asked only for what changed (If-None-Match, If-Modified-Since). An item is posted once: its Message-ID is made from the feed and the item's id, and remembered after the message is purged. The first reading of a feed posts at most max_items of its newest.

contact is sent in the User-Agent. The SEC refuses readers without a way to reach the person running them, and the National Weather Service asks for one.

The catalogue¶

bbs feeds catalog lists the feeds the BBS knows. catalog = takes all, groups or names:

Group	Feeds
News	BBC World, NPR, AP News (by way of Google News: AP has no feeds of its own), The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CBC, Deutsche Welle, Global Voices
Business	BBC Business, NPR Business, SEC press releases, SEC 8-K filings (EDGAR)
Technology	BBC Technology, Ars Technica, The Register, Hacker News
Science	NASA, USGS earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 and more
Government	the Federal Register (significant documents), Congress.gov (most-viewed bills, bills presented to the President, House and Senate floor), the White House, National Weather Service news

The US government's feeds are in the public domain. The outlets' are theirs: the BBS shows what they publish in their feeds, with the link. Reuters and AP stopped publishing feeds (2020, 2024).

Feeds of your own¶

[feed lobsters]
url = https://lobste.rs/rss
title = Lobsters
area = Lobsters
group = Technology
every = 60
keep_days = 14

title is who the messages are from (the feed's own title if not said), area the area (the section's name if not said), keep_days how long messages are kept when the area is made (bbs area keep changes it after). A section named as a catalogue feed changes it ([feed nasa] with area = Space), and enabled = no leaves it out.

bbs feeds read [NAME...] reads the feeds now, bbs feeds list shows what is configured.

A news area that is a newsgroup is offered to news peers like any other: leave feed newsgroups out of a peer's groups unless you mean to pass the news on.

Your weather¶

[weather]
contact = sysop@example.org
international = yes
quake_radius = 300
quake_min = 2.5
alerts_at_login = yes

The first time, the caller says where they are: a US ZIP code, a town (Springfield, IL, Leeds, UK, Paris, France, Tokyo), or a latitude and longitude. Towns are looked up in Open-Meteo's gazetteer (GeoNames); when there are several of that name, the caller chooses. ZIP codes are the US Census Bureau's tabulation areas, built into the BBS. The place is kept with the account.

The weather screen has, in order:

Warnings, watches and advisories in force at that point, from the National Weather Service (US only), the most serious first, with what to do.
The forecast: the National Weather Service's seven days in the US; elsewhere Open-Meteo's (the weather now, then seven days). Open-Meteo is free for non-commercial use and its data is CC BY 4.0, so the screen credits it; international = no leaves it out.
Earthquakes of the past week within quake_radius km of quake_min or more (and great ones, 6 and more, from four times as far), from the USGS, worldwide. Those with a PAGER alert above green or a tsunami flag are marked.

Units are US (°F, mph) in the US and metric elsewhere; the caller can change them. With alerts_at_login, a caller is told of Severe and Extreme warnings where they are as they log in.

What is fetched is kept a while (the NWS's points a day, forecasts half an hour, alerts five minutes, the earthquake list ten minutes, shared by all), so callers in one town cost one request.

Stock quotes¶

[quotes]
file = /var/lib/bbs/quotes.json.gz
default = SPY DIA QQQ AAPL MSFT

The quotes are IEX's (the Investors Exchange): its own trades and quotes, not the whole market's, with IEX's credit on each screen. Every caller has a list of symbols (default until they add or remove one); a symbol chosen shows its last trade, open, high, low, close, extended-hours price, bid and ask, and IEX volume (all the market's, from Alpaca's paid plan).

The day before's prices, free (HIST)¶

IEX publishes each session's whole TOPS feed the next day, free. bbs quotes fetch reads the latest session's file into file. The file is some 16 GB, so it is read as it downloads and nothing of it is kept but the quotes (a few hundred KB); at 60 MB/s it takes under five minutes. A download cut off is taken up where it stopped. Run it each morning as an event:

[event quotes]
command = /usr/local/bin/bbs -config /etc/bbs/bbs.conf quotes fetch
at = 06:30
timeout = 3600

The change from the day before needs the day before's prices: the first time, fetch the session before by its date, then the latest:

bbs quotes fetch 20261105
bbs quotes fetch
bbs quotes show AAPL SPY

bbs quotes load FILE reads a TOPS capture you have (pcap or pcapng, gzipped or not), and the BBS reads the new file when it changes, with no restart.

IEX's terms for HIST data ask for its credit ("Data provided for free by IEX"), which the screens show.

Live (TOPS)¶

[quotes]
listen = 233.215.21.4:10378
interface = eth1
delay = 15 minutes

A sysop who receives IEX's TOPS feed (its real-time feed, or its free delayed one; both need a connection to IEX) can give its UDP address. The BBS joins the multicast group and keeps the quotes as they come; delay is told to callers. Without trades yet today, the screens show the file's.

The feed is IEX-TP carrying TOPS 1.6 (DEEP's messages are read too: trades, quotes, official prices, trading status, system events). Test securities are left out; odd lots count toward volume but not the last sale, high or low; trades outside regular hours are the extended-hours price.

Live from Alpaca¶

[quotes]
alpaca_key = PK...
alpaca_secret = ...
alpaca_feed = iex
alpaca_symbols = 30

Alpaca's market data needs no connection to IEX: an account (a paper-trading one will do) gives a key and secret. Its free plan (alpaca_feed = iex) has IEX's trades and quotes, live; a paid one (sip) every US exchange's, and delayed_sip them 15 minutes late.

A symbol a caller looks at is fetched then (Alpaca's snapshot: the day so far, and the day before's close for the change), and followed on Alpaca's stream: the default symbols and those looked at most recently, up to alpaca_symbols (the free plan allows 30 at a time). What is followed is fetched again every five minutes; the rest when it is next looked at, if a minute old. The quotes begin again with each session's first trade, so nothing need run each morning. The session (before the open, regular hours, after hours, closed) is by the clock: a weekday with no trades by 9:35 is taken for a holiday.

bbs quotes alpaca AAPL MSFT tries the keys: the snapshots, then the stream for a few seconds. Keep the configuration file 0640, as the keys are in it.

Alpaca's terms are for personal, non-commercial use: to make its data available to others through your own application, they ask for 30 days' written notice first, and its written consent to republish it. Tell them of the BBS before you turn this on. listen and alpaca_key are one or the other.