On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 12:07:31AM +0100, Paulo Pinto wrote: > Am 05.12.2012 23:40, schrieb js.mdnq: [...] > >IMO, the only downside is supporting legacy users who refuse to make > >the transition. I think they are just being hard headed though... > > I hate web forums with passion, they all suck compared to the browsing > experience most NNTP clients offer. > > I can browse threads just with keyboard navigation, follow discussion > threads, mark/unmark all I have read, save discussions for posterity, > all with a standards compliant network protocol free of walled garden > data servers.
Finally, a voice of reason! > As for spam, that is what moderation is for, if ever needed. > > I am a firm believer that users of web forums can only find them > better than Usenet, because they haven't experienced Usenet in its > golden days. [...] Yeah, what is left of Usenet these days is not even a faint shadow of what it was back in the day, nor a representative indicator of the soundness of its paradigm. I alluded to protocol over application earlier, and perhaps it's worth belaboring the point. The reason the Internet even exists today is because somebody had the sense to realize that relying on a specific software application simply will not cut it. It's not scalable, not interoperable, and not practical on any non-trivial scale. Instead of forcing everything and everyone to conform to a single software application and a single way of doing things, a set of powerful generic protocols were designed. By standardizing on the protocol rather than the software, an entire field was opened up: it doesn't matter what OS or software you're using and what OS or software I'm using, as long as they speak the same protocol, they're automatically compatible. You can have a hundred completely different OSes, twelve hundred completely different software applications all by different vendors, but by virtue of their speaking the same protocol, they can interoperate. And they will continue to interoperate with *future* OSes and software that haven't even been dreamed of yet, as long as the same protocol continues to be used. Had the designers of the internet back in its embryonic stages decided to standardize instead on a specific set of software programs from a single vendor that can only communicate amongst themselves, the internet wouldn't even *exist* today. Version incompatibilities, program bugs that become depended on (and therefore unfixable), non-interoperability with anything but software developed by that one vendor, etc., would have killed off the internet years before it became the internet. All web forums assume (1) you're using a browser, (2) your browser is GUI-based, (3) your browser is configured with certain minimal features like Javascript, cookies, etc.. There is (1) no way to use anything *other* than a browser (and a *graphical* one to boot -- it's so painful to use with a text browser you might as well be talking HTTP with a magnet, a pair of tweezers, and a really steady hand holding a cat5 cable) to use the forum, even though forums themselves have no inherent need for the bloated monstrosities that today's browsers have mutated into, (2) no way to access the forum data directly -- it's walled behind the guises of a graphical UI-centric paged interface designed for GUI users' consumption, and therefore inconvenient or just plain impossible for programs to work with directly, which results in (3) you *have* to use that interface to access that data, and if that interface is hard to use or buggy, well, life just sucks, deal with it. IOW, (4) you cannot easily archive posts, sort them by thread, navigate them programmatically, back them up en masse in your personal archives. To make things worse, (5) the single UI that you have no choice over usually has a totally dainbramaged search function that doesn't even hold a candle to a full-powered regex search engine that a text-based NNTP client is capable of. Not to mention bandwidth-wasting with nonsense like logo graphics and other needless eye-candy, which is totally worthless when what you want is *information*. HTML, especially the kind used in web forums, is dismally low in signal-to-noise ratio. Most of it consumed with visual tags and presentation (and most of the rest of it with baroque boilerplates mandated by W3C that are just copy-n-pasted everywhere anyway) which are totally useless when what you really care about is the *meat*: the text of the forum posts. With NNTP, you can (1) use a text-based client, like I do, and be able to navigate 5000-post threads with ease, WITHOUT needing to touch the rodent; (2) use the web interface on dlang.org, which some really smart people have put together in a very usable way for those who prefer GUIs; (3) use an automatic archiver; (4) run your own NNTP backup server; (5) telnet to port 119 and talk to the server directly ;-); and (6) any or all of the above as you please. It's the protocols that matter. It's the protocols that build infrastructure. Walled-garden web forums are just an anachronism to the pre-internet days of gratuitous system incompatibilities, inability of interoperating, and pointless turf wars over which program is "better" (hint: they *all* suck). Just ask Nick about github sometime. :-P :-P I'll shut up now. T -- Век живи - век учись. А дураком помрёшь.
