Walter Bright wrote:
Yigal Chripun wrote:
I've thought about building such a system for these forums many times.
Registration would not be required to post, but registering would enable
features like voting on posts, establishing a profile, preferences, etc.
That sounds awesome. Another useful feature would be storing session
info in the profile such that if I read a post at work the post will
be marked as such when I use a different computer/news-reader like my
home PC.
Yup. What I hate about reddit/slashdot/ycombinator is there's no way to
mark ones I've read as read. On a long thread, it's really hard to see
if there's anything new.
wouldn't it be easier to just use web forums (there are many existing
system with all the bells and whistles) and write a news-gateway for
it than to implement all the features for the current news-server?
it'll also fix the currently broken web interface for the NG.
They all suck. Sorry.
Most use far too much vertical space, spreading the thread out over
multiple pages, or don't indent a threaded view. And *none* of them have
the ability to mark what you've read.
Most of the web forums I use can be configured per user to determine how
many threads to show on one page, or how many posts to show in the
thread per page. All of the popular forums these days have features to
mark posts as read, mark all read, show posts since last visit, and so
on. My particular favorite is SMF[1].
FWIW, this is the only set of newsgroups I read. In fact, I thought I
had unsubscribed from my last newsgroup in the late 90s, and was a bit
miffed to see that D didn't have a mailing list when I first stumbled
across it. All of the other development communities I'm interested in
offer mailing lists or web forums. I particularly like mailing lists,
since I use GMail. It makes a world of difference. Searching through
these newsgroups can be aggravating. If we could get on Google Groups
I'd have less to gripe about.
IMO, newsgroups should just die. But I seem to be in the minority here.
