[Asterisk-Users] Voice Based Bulletin Board.

[Garrett Hart]

First, I did my noob homework and found a thread where this had been 
discussed to some degree in a thread titled "asterisk based bbs" in 
2004. I've got a question or two that that thread didn't address.

I want to set up a voice based BBS. This will barely stray from the text 
based bulletin board paradigm we have now. Users will still go to a web 
page. There, they will still see threaded text based lists of topics and 
responses. The only differences are: 1. When a user clicks through text 
based link in a thread they will hear the users response instead of 
reading it; and 2. When creating a new topic or responding they would 
still enter the text based title, but instead of entering the text for 
their response they will enter their phone number and hit submit. Their 
phone rings and they record their post.

Plusses:
- Maintains many of the advantages of text based system including quick 
scanning of topics and a visual representation of the threads of 
discussion.
- No more emoticons or cap locks. When I want to yell I'll yell!
- I write some pretty long posts. Talking would save me some time...I 
think.

Minuses:
- Search is whacked beyond the posts' titles.
- Your typical user will need a fatter pipe to "read" posts (but not to 
create them, a plus).
- More storage needed.
- More complicated setup.

Now I am sure there is a way to get this done with asterisk and that is 
what I will eventually pursue. I was wondering though if I could create 
a fairly temporary solution that would work in a shared hosting (read 
rented server space) environment which is what I have now.

It seems like it would be possible to hack this together with one of the 
existing VOIP service providers. I know they have voice mail forwarded 
as email. I could just have the mail forwarded to an account on my 
shared web server. They must be time stamped so I could use that to sort 
out which email goes with which post on the web server.

The thing I don't know about the service providers is do they have an 
API to which an internet request can be made to from my web server to 
initiate a call that is supposed to be recorded. Do any of you know if 
any of them offer that?

Are there asterisk hosting service providers that work along the same 
lines as web hosting companies?