[OpenIndiana-discuss] forum creation

[James Carlson]

On 01/28/15 14:28, David Brodbeck wrote:
> I'm quite aware of how newsgroups work; I started out reading them in "tin"
> in college.  You're forgetting that it also needs an ISP with a working
> news server, which is increasingly rare.

Actually, no, it doesn't.  It's trivial to set up a stand-alone NNTP
server with an arbitrary set of local groups if that's what someone
really wants.  Several companies use this approach -- Sybase did so
until being eaten by the Borg.

Even if you want to use a "real" newsgroup, and have it mirrored
everywhere, it's not a big deal.  You don't need your ISP's help for
access.  Sites such as giganews.net and newsdemon.com make access
trivial and cheap.  (Yeah, it was nice when ISPs used to help out with
this minor cost, but those days are long past.)

>  I don't think my current ISP runs
> one.  Last time I used a newsgroup was about ten years ago, and even then
> it was a matter of sifting a relatively small number of legitimate messages
> out of an ocean of spam and broken threads.  It's kind of sad how that
> medium has declined.

Indeed.  That's mostly as a side-effect of all those developers setting
up little Facebook-like forum fiefdoms.  I hate having to visit 100 of
these just to keep up, so I don't.  If it comes to me via email (for
which I've subscribed), then I read it.  Otherwise, I likely won't see it.

To me, that's the big problem with the model: the forum developer thinks
he owns your feed of news from the universe, and he does not.

(And, yes, I know about RSS.  At least for me, it just makes the chaos
worse.)

> I like it much better then needing to browse through some simulation of
>> newsgroups and mailing lists on web sites, that forums are.
>>
> 
> I think this is the nub of the problem.  Forums vary widely in quality and
> some are quite usable, but if you come in expecting them to work exactly
> like an NNTP client you'll always be disappointed.

I expect them to spend 99.99% of the forum development effort on
emoticon management/rendering and about 0.01% of the work on fast text
search capabilities, so I'm never disappointed.

-- 
James Carlson         42.703N 71.076W         <carlsonj at workingcode.com>