[NTLUG:Discuss] NNTP/News access

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Wed Mar 12 11:29:12 CST 2003


On Tuesday 11 March 2003 06:31 pm, Greg Edwards wrote:
> You can ask it to send you digests.  One mail message that you can page 
> down skipping content you don't want to read.

I've never been too satisfied with this. The main problem is that there 
doesn't seem to be any option to get the digest threaded. That makes 
following conversations harder than with either regular subscription or news. 
I wonder if threading the digests would be technically feasible (having no 
idea how mailman does it internally).

> You can tell it that your out of town and not to send you anything.

I never noticed this (or I forgot).  A lot of lists I get are managed by 
mailman, so maybe I should check into it.  The main use would seem to be to 
be able to turn lists off and on depending on whether I'm following that 
subject (e.g. I like to be on the ALSA list when I'm fiddling with sound 
cards, but I generally don't pay much attention to it).  As it is, I'm on 
about 15 or 20 MLs, and I don't read most of them most of the time.  :-P

But I don't want to lose contact with them in case I want them again.

I guess the real issue is keeping track of the management pages. I guess I 
could set up a bookmarks folder just for that.

Thanks for the prod. ;-)

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

This statement is really very interesting to me.

It isn't actually like browsing a newsgroup, because you're not using a news 
client but a web browser. It is therefore more like viewing a web forum.  But 
many people especially despise web forums (while others like them a lot). The 
distinction seems to mainly be the client you use, though, not the technology 
itself.

Isn't that interesting?  You'd think people would be concerned about visual 
formatting or concepts, and not so attached to particular applications.   It 
has to be a high-familiarity issue.  Or one of keeping information channels 
within the same program (e.g. people like to stick to mailing lists because 
then they get parallel information in a parallel way?).

Likewise, the people who mainly like web forums seem to be mostly people who 
use their web browsers a lot, but don't use mail or news much (or at all).

This interests me a lot because I'm developing a forum web application on 
Zope ( about it: http://www.narya.net , prototype: http://narya.net ).  Very 
incomplete, but I'm working on it. If it were more complete I'd have 
recommended it as a forum for y'all to use, but it's just way too alpha.  ;-D

One thing I've tried to evaluate is the relative value of providing the 
look-and-feel of mail or news interaction versus the need to provide gateway 
mechanisms to allow users to interact using mail or news clients.  The latter 
is somewhat more complicated, but it might be the only way to serve certain 
users if my speculations above are valid.

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com



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