at Saturday, October 12, 2002 2:01 AM, Steve Furlong
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was seen to say:
> On Thursday 10 October 2002 13:13, Tim May wrote:

> There are two advantages of web-based discussion fora over usenet:
> propagation time and firewalls.
Not sure about that - propagation time is a issue of course, but a web
interface to nntp isn't that hard (dejanews offered it for years) and
the propagation issue is "fixed" only by limiting the web forum to a
single server or local cluster of servers - if you were setting up a
web-based interface anyhow, you could get all the benefits of a single
server node while not preventing users not using the web interface from
participating. yes, NNTP submissions from other usenet servers might
take a while to propagate to the "Master" server (or vice versa) but
that wouldnt' affect the web interface users amongst themselves or
indeed, anyone using nntp directly to that server.

> On the other hand, few discussions are
> so urgent that they need near-real-time reparte, and participants
> shouldn't be cruising usenet from work.
depends on the forum. there are groups I *only* read at work - technical
ones of course, related to my job.  Usenet is a resource, and at times a
good one (provided you can live with the low signal-to-noise ratio).

>> More generally, I've been watching the migration of many discussion
>> groups over to "Web-based forums" (or fora). Usually the migration
>> does not improve the discussion...it just puts dancing ads and cruft
>> all over the pages.
probably more to the point - *profit-making* dancing ads.

> Something like...Google? You can't count on their sweep schedule, but
> it does most of what you're looking for.
deja-google is ok, but a lot of the more interesting threads include
x-no-archive headers (which google respects, and rightly so) somewhere
in them, so you have gaps...

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