[NTLUG:Discuss] NNTP/News access

[Jack Snodgrass]

On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 20:31, Greg Edwards wrote:

> Mailman has this little feature called account management, newsgroups don't.

ah.... you just set up the news server to require userid/passwords. 
Since this is a private news server, and you have to 'subscribe' to 
the mailing list, I don't see a userid/password thing much of a problem.
> You can ask it to send you digests.  One mail message that you can page 
> down skipping content you don't want to read.

you can't go with the "we're on slow dial up line.... we can't handle 
HTML.... our links are too slow.... don't send sig lines... don't 
send un-necessary replies...." and then say .... Just put all of the 
posts into one HUGE, WOPPING single post and get it once a day. 

I can't see how you want to say that downloading 50K of data and 
then paging through it is better than downloading 1K of data, 
seeing the new headers:
thread 1
thread 2
thread 3
thread 4
and then picking the messages in thread 2 to read ( 10K ). 

> You can tell it that your out of town and not to send you anything.
ah... you can not use your news reader. 
ah... if your out of town, access the news server remotely.
ah... what is your point? 

> 
> Archives that let you go scan by subject, author, date, yada-yada. 
> Kinda like browsing a newgroup if that is your desire.

ah... go to the 'search' box on Pan ( a really nice Linux news
reader ) and type in 'redhat' and get all messages with redhat in the 
subject. 

> 
> Unlike a newsgroup you have lots of options on how you get content from 
> mailman.  I think it's called freedom of choice.

Unlike getting tons of mail in your mail box ( 2300 since I cleaned out
my NTLUG Folder a while back ) you can just PICK AND CHOOSE what you 
want to read and don't get a buch of stuff that your not interested in 
pushed to you. That's freedom of choice. 

jack