The BBS list is an old genre with one persistent failure mode: it rots. A board goes down, nothing removes the entry, and a year later the list is half addresses that no longer answer. Nothing in the page distinguishes them, so the reader has to try each one to find out. Past a certain ratio of dead to live, the list has stopped being a directory and become a historical document that doesn't know it.
BBS HQ is an attempt at the other thing: a directory that actually dials.
As of the scan on 14 September 2026, it knows about 1,057 boards, of which 707 answered and 500 carry their own art. Those numbers are printed at the top of the directory with the date of the scan attached, because a count without a date is the same failure in a different shape.
Three states, because "busy" is not "down"
Each board is marked UP, BUSY, or NOT UP.
The middle one is the reason it's three and not two. A board whose nodes are all in use answered the phone - it is running, staffed, and being called by someone else right now. That is close to the opposite of down. Folding it into a single "unavailable" bit would file the most active boards in the directory alongside the abandoned ones.
The art is the board
A BBS greets you with ANSI art before you log in. That screen is the board's identity in a way its hostname is not - it's what the sysop chose to put in front of you, and frequently the best thing on the system.
Most directories reduce that to a row of text. The ones that try harder take a screenshot, which is better but throws away everything that made it text: you cannot select it, search it, or read it with a screen reader, and it blurs the moment anyone zooms.
BBS HQ pulls the art off the wire the same way a caller would, and renders it as real text in the browser, using the Web437 IBM VGA 9x16 font (by VileR, CC BY-SA 4.0). Same glyphs, same 9x16 cell, same colours - but selectable, searchable, accessible, and sharp at any size. The art on every board's page is that board's own, not an illustration of it.
The software column is an accidental census
Sorting the directory by software turns up around 130 distinct packages in active use. Synchronet and Mystic dominate, as you'd expect, but the tail is the interesting part: WWIV, Renegade, PCBoard, Wildcat, Maximus, Telegard, Ezycom, Spitfire, Citadel, Searchlight.
Then the genuinely surprising ones - Amiga CNET and AmiExpress, Image BBS and CNet DS2 on Commodore hardware, GBBS Pro and BBS Express Pro on the Apple II, Forem XE on Atari. Not emulated screenshots. Running systems with a telnet address, taking calls tonight.
That census only exists as a side effect of checking whether the boards answer. It's the kind of thing you can only learn by dialling all of them, repeatedly.
What's actually open
The directory, and nothing else yet. The site lists departments for a Sysop Desk, an Art Vault, Networks, Door Games and History, and says plainly underneath that only the directory is open and the rest are "placeholders, not promises" - which is the correct way to list an intention.
bbshq.org. A Bad Cluster project, affiliated with The Vortex.