On Mon, 2011-10-10 at 13:12 -0400, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: > 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.
+1 However, pondering for even a little bit as to why I no longer use NNTP that much I conclude that it is "pull like" enough such that web based forums have taken over catering to the "pull niche", while SMTP has remained steadfast for those preferring "push" approaches. -- Regards-- Ken Gunderson _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
