While I think that the commentary on NNTP is essentially correct -- we are rebuilding the foundation of NNTP, I want to raise a couple of issues that may justify just WHY such a rebuilding is necessary.
I started working with NNTP back in 1992 ... it was in fact my first experience with the Internet, prior in fact to HTTP/HTML. At the time, NNTP was small, largely free, was run by a coterie of competent amateurs for the love of the medium and was very much devoted to handling the issues associated with maintaining threading across the boundaries of the nascent Internet. In a decade, the threats that have been lingering at the edge of e-mail has pretty much devoured NNTP. NNTP is difficult to moderate, difficult to search, difficult to archive, difficult to set up. If you want NNTP access, you often have to pay extra from your ISP, and there is no guarantee that the newsgroups that YOU need are going to be available via the server. The bulk of material circulating on Usenet is porn span, sent not by legitimate users of the servers but by companies that seem to feel that extreme (and typically disgusting) acts of sexual display will drive people to their sites. The high volume and poor archiving formats also insure that newsgroups are short memory archives at best. Finally, the role of the web has changed enough that most people are simply not aware that Usenet exists, even in those cases where it is available. Contrast that to what's going on with the current Drupal modules and RSS syndication. I've written chapters in a couple of books on RSS, and consequently have had a lot of chance to think about what exactly this medium is. RSS is significant in that it provides a way to aggregate links and associate that aggregation with some form of editorial filtering and annotation. Why is that important? In great part because it is a function which currently is not done very well within the confines of web pages. Many web pages contain links and editorial content on those links, but in most cases such information is not terribly filterable, is reliant upon webmasters remaining on top of their link pages on a regular basis (something that very seldom occurs in practice) and such feeds cannot be merged together to provide a large stream of aggregation. In other words, the meta-content that Web Pages are able to offer are far less than what RSS can do. A Drupal node can be thought of as a distributor of RSS feeds of varying types, which may or may not also be a transport mechanism for content itself. In most cases RSS is most efficient when the only payload information it does carry is abstracts of contents and linkages, perhaps with enough overhead in terms of production dates and authors to allow verification systems to work effectively. RSS abstracts and categories can be archived and persisted, can be formatted any number of different ways with relatively little work and because of its XML base works well in web services environments. You don't need a specialized server to use it, which isn't true of NNTP, and you aren't dependent upon having to go through a community process to create a new newsgroup, minimizing the alt.* phenomenon. -- Kurt On Sun, Jul 27, 2003 at 09:32:01PM -0700, Ka-Ping Yee wrote: > On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > > NNTP. > > You do realize that what we are doing is rebuilding much of > what NNTP is supposed to do, don't you? Of course I do. That's precisely why I recommended you use the infrastructure and tools already extant. > That's slightly tongue-in-cheek -- but only slightly. Multiple > sites aggregating articles, sharing articles with each other, > updating each other on new posts: it's been done, and it's called > Usenet. Of course we're adding user authentication, nice graphics, > and more structured data -- but it's worth noting that Usenet > didn't work by having every site poll every other site for updates. > > Just something to think about. And it's *also* worth noting that it's *miserable* -- I mean *REALLY REALLY* painful, to follow more than about 4 web forums, run on different sites, hosted by different software packages, with different command structures, and different signons. Stipulated, some percentage of the crowd will *only* ever go here... but I'm inclined to think that's a smaller percentage than might seem obvious... and that the proper solution is to build a web-based NNTP client front end and use the already existant infrastructure which is tuned for that, instead of rebuilding the wheel. MIME is not real popular on traditional Usenet, but no reason you can't use it in a custom implementation on top... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c
