About AustinSpring

The Spring BBS, 1996–2014, rebuilt.

What is this

AustinSpring is a revival of spring.com / spring.net — a web-based BBS that ran out of Austin, Texas from 1996 to 2014, modeled on the WELL. It had 1,000+ members and 85+ discussion conferences, and it was one of the first online communities in Texas. It went dark when the spring.com domain was sold in 2014 and spring.net followed shortly after.

This site is its reconstruction. Every conference page, every topic, and every reply here came from the Wayback Machine's captures of spring.net. The reconstruction pipeline pulls each archived thread, parses the yapp BBS format, and renders it as a modern static page. On top of the archive sits a live Flask app that lets anyone sign up with a handle and add new posts to old threads or start new topics.

What's live right now

37Conferences

3,724Topics

198,341Responses

—Members

—Active this week

1996–2013Content range

Who runs it

Paul Terry Walhus (@springnet), the original BBS sysop. Paul started spring.com as a Unix CLI BBS in Austin in 1996 and ran it for almost two decades. After SXSW 2007 he was profiled by BuzzFeed, Slate, and the NYT as “the original King of Twitter” — the handle @springnet was named after this BBS.

The reconstruction was built in 2026 in collaboration with AI (Claude Code) as a side project of the WholeTech Network.

About your old posts

If you posted on The Spring between 1996 and 2014, those posts are here under the same handle you used back then. We preserved them because conversations like yours are the whole point of the site and because Wayback had already made them public. We also want you to be able to come back.

✓ What we will do

Preserve your posts under your original handle.
Let you claim your handle — sign up with the same username you used, and email walhus@gmail.com so we can verify. No other signup can take your name.
Remove any post you authored, on request, with no questions asked.
Preserve attribution even when you've moved on. We won't delete posts to erase history unless you want yours gone.

Takedown requests

Email walhus@gmail.com with the subject line takedown. Include:

The handle whose posts to remove (must be yours)
Optional: which conferences or specific topics
A signature or detail that helps us verify you're the real author (old email address, a memorable detail, etc.)

We typically act within 72 hours. Requests from verified authors are honored in full.

Rules for posting

Be decent. Disagreement is welcome; personal attacks get deleted.
Don't impersonate. Pick a handle that's yours.
No spam, no affiliate dumps, no scraper-bait.
Handles and posts are public. Don't post anything you'd want private.
One account per person. Ban evasion gets you banned again.

How to participate

Where to start

If you don't know where to begin, start with the very first topic on The Spring:

📌 Topic 1: let’s introduce ourselves
Started by ~terry in 1996. Every member's first move was a hello here. It's where the community was built and where it picks back up.

Feeds

Every conference has an RSS feed. There's also a firehose of all activity:

All activity — firehose (new topics + replies + archive comments)
/drool RSS, /porch RSS, and so on for every conference (replace slug in URL)
Per-thread RSS coming soon.

The yapp epigrams

The original Yapp documentation had a distinct voice — direct, plain, mildly epigrammatic. A few lines worth re-reading every time you log in:

“Can’t talk to you, without talking to me.”
— Robert Hunter (epigraph in the original Yapp users guide)

“You are conversing with other people, not with bits and bytes on your screen.”

“Cut slack as you would like to have slack cut for you.”

“Responses are really the building blocks of conferencing.”

“You, as a participant, are the primary creator of topic content.”

Contact

sysop: walhus@gmail.com
twitter/x: @springnet
site: austinspring.com

Thanks for coming back. — Paul (~terry)