Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On 2/10/01 12:28 AM, "Russ Allbery" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Most of the web-only solutions attempt to reinvent solved problems
>> badly (such as threading). NNTP has had over a decade to get some of
>> this stuff right and has learned at least a little from its mistakes.
> The more you talk about this and the more I think about it, the more I'm
> intrigued. Do you have any sites you can point me to where they've done
> this? I want to go do some research....
Most of the people who I know to be working on this are in Europe, where
Usenet continues to be more generally popular than in the United States so
far as I can tell. I think part of why is because the non-English
newsgroups have managed to keep a better newsgroup creation system and a
better signal to noise ratio than the English groups, but that's a guess
based on some second-hand observations.
Take a look at <http://floh.gartenhaus.net/newsportal/> for starters;
that's the most recent PHP-based news reader implementation that I've seen
and I know a few sites that are using it in situations where other sites
may use web boards. (One of the advantages over mailing lists is that
it's really quick and easy to create a new newsgroup on your own local
news server; it's quite reasonable to create one per topic provided that
your interface exposes them easily to readers. It's even reasonable to
let more "trusted" users create their own.)
There are some other ones out there, but I don't have other URLs for you.
> You aren't planning to implement the Accolade header after all these
> years? (grin)
Not personally, no. :) But one of the nice things about the news
overview model is that it's basically a meta-information database about
the articles, which are left unaltered. Sure, on a regular news server,
nearly all of that information is extracted from the headers (except for
bytes and lines), but there's no need for it to be that way. There's
already code in INN for automatically generated keywords, and I've been
thinking about generalizing that to allow Perl or Python hooks to generate
arbitrary additional information to drop into overview.
(INN can now embed Python as well as Perl, incidentally; I seem to recall
that you like that language.)
> I've actually been heavily researching the slashdot style boards the
> last few weeks. They have some interesting plusses and minuses. I find I
> prefer the variant at www.kuro5hin.org better than slashdot itself, and
> they aren't really community tools (they're information concentrators),
Agreed. The discussion model is really quite poor, and only marginally
better than the nearly worthless "talk-back" sections that a lot of
mainstream news agencies with web presences have started adding to their
stories. It *is* at least threaded, which is a plus, but many of the
comments on both Slashdot-style and "talk-back"-style comment boards are
more at the IRC level than the Usenet or mailing list response level.
This ties into my general impression of most web discussion boards as
strongly discouraging responses of any real length, largely due to serious
interface problems when you try to use a web form to write anything
containing substantial content. (I've yet to see a web browser that
actually has an adequate built-in editor.) This is one of the things I
very much like about Usenet and mailing lists; it's pretty rare to see a
response of the length of *any* of those on this thread on a web board,
let alone a whole dialog with multiple levels of quoting.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
