Walter Bright wrote:
Yet I don't have to mess with any of that stuff with a newsreader! I don't have to configure it, zoom it, install ad blockers, etc. It just works, and since little data is transferred, it's fast, too. I also like how it's archived as a bunch of text files.
Conversely, I wouldn't have needed to go out and install a newsreader if you had used forum software instead of newsgroups. I stopped using them over a decade ago and didn't expect to have to ever subscribe to one again. I follow quite a few software projects and development communities. Out of them all, this is the only one that has a newsgroup. Even so, it was a long time between first finding D and actually subscribing. If I hadn't been so enthralled after playing around with the language, I wouldn't be here right now.
With web forums, any posts I mark as read on my iPhone when I'm on the bus or subway, or on another computer, will still be marked as read when I get back home. But if I view the newsgroup's web interface on my iPhone, I'll sometimes wind up wasting a bit of time when I next fire up the newsreader at home, clicking through messages I've already seen. So I don't do that anymore. When I went to the States for three weeks in February, I didn't browse the D newsgroups at all, because I knew when I got home there'd be a few hundred messages I'd already seen marked as unread in my reader. I did keep up with all the forum-based communities I follow, though.
Most forum software is highly configurable and offers so much more beyond just the forum threads, such as email notification for important topics you want to follow, private messages without handing out your email address, the ability to post images or youtube videos inline, plugins (on the admin side) and more. Every time I open Thunderbird to see the D groups, I feel like I'm back in 1995.
Despite all of that, I won't be bothered one way or the other if things never change. I'm no stranger to newsgroups and I've settled in to using Thunderbird. But what concerns me is how many people don't come into the community because there are no web forums. We have no way to know that. But I know it does happen, because I've done it myself with other projects.
And, for the record, SMF (and most other open source software) does not come with ads. Ads are set up by administrators.
