[OpenIndiana-discuss] Help with website

[Richard L. Hamilton]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 3:22 AM, Kees Nuyt wrote:

> On Sun, 9 Oct 2011 02:51:13 -0400, Richard wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Oct 8, 2011, at 9:49 PM, Josef 'Jeff' Sipek wrote:
>> 
>>> On Sat, Oct 08, 2011 at 06:35:57PM -0600, LinuxBSDos.com wrote:
> [snip]
>> 
>> I must be old-fashioned, but I find an NNTP server
>> easier than forums (and less junk accumulating on
>> my mail server).  Seamonkey has an adequate reader,
>> although I prefer knews.  Those have nice threading,
>> killfiles, etc.  And they're usually _much_ faster
>> and less problems than a web forum.
> 
> +1
> 
> A mailing list is fine too, and the mailing list archives will
> take care of it being searchable.
> I don't mind if the lists are bridged to a webforum.
> 
>> A server that does not exchange info with other NNTP
>> servers, and requires a login to post, seems like it
>> would work well enough.
> 
> Sounds like subscription, that's what mailing lists are for ;)

But news readers have tools that are better suited to following conversations of interest (or excluding those not of interest) in very large volumes.  Mail can be overwhelming at a few hundred a day, but one can keep up with Usenet on the level of thousands of posts a day (if one  uses the tools to be selective, and reads fast).

NNTP and SMTP are really quite similar, except news is always retrieved from one or potentially a network of servers, while SMTP may be either delivered or retrieved as the last step.  Both can handle attachments, and both can have clients that are might lighter weight than web browsers (and servers much less prone to problems than some used with web forums).  Light and fast are helpful when trying to keep up with a large volume.

One can of course continue to use mailing lists, but to set them up in such a way that they can be made available to NNTP clients via gmane, or something similar.  There's usually a lot less trouble bridging mail and news than mail and web forums, I should think; yet news (in its readers, and in the basic search functions of the server) offers some forum-like functionality that mail does not.

Readers shouldn't be a problem; everyone should probably have or be able to get Seamonkey, or for those unfortunates not able to separate themselves from Windows, Outlook Express  (which IIRC has a news reading capability).  Not that those are the only choices, by any means.

The one advantage I can see with a web forum is if there were a lot of large attachments anticipated.  On a web forum, they wouldn't have to be subjected to a bandwidth-hungry encoding to pass over mail.  People have of course passed around large attachments with news, but it's ugly, unless one has a reader that's specifically meant to put that back together again.