View modes
You can browse the discussions using one of several view modes:
- Basic - A forum-like view with paged linear threads.
- Threaded - Threaded group overview with single post display, similar to mailing list archives.
- Horizontal-split - JavaScript-powered interface with a split view and keyboard shortcuts, similar to a mail or newsgroup client.
Read post history
The posts you've viewed are saved to a compressed cookie, or on the server if you're logged in. Viewing a thread in basic view will mark all displayed posts as "read". The horizontal-split view allows marking individual posts as "unread".
To avoid losing read post history, consider registering an account to avoid cookie limitations / expiration / accidental deletion.
Accounts
Preferences and read post history are stored in cookies for unregistered users. Registering an account will transfer all variables from cookies to the server database.
Email address
When posting, you need to indicate an email address. It doesn't need to be a valid one; this software will not send anything to the specified address. The email address will be made public to other users of the news server / mailing list you are posting to. Therefore, please be aware that malicious robots may be able to collect your address and send spam to it.
The email address is also used to display an avatar (see below).
Avatars
The discussion board will display avatars associated with users' email addresses. If the email address is registered with Gravatar, the associated avatar is shown. Otherwise, an Identicon generated from a hash of the email address is displayed as a fallback.
To use a custom avatar on this discussion board, register an account at Gravatar, associate an email address with an image, and use that email address when posting to this discussion board. Additionally, you can create a Gravatar profile, which will be accessible by clicking on your avatar.
Canonical links
If you'd like to get a link to a particular thread or post, you should right-click the post title and select "Copy link location" (or your browser's equivalent). If you copy the contents of your browser's address bar, the resulting link may be excessively long, and may not work as well for users who have selected a different view mode. A canonical link has the form http://domain/post/message-id@goes-here.
About
This discussion board is a web frontend to the DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. It is part of DFeed, which is also a D news aggregator and IRC bot.
DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir “CyberShadow” Panteleev. Portions (including style and graphics) are Copyright © by Digital Mars. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
Contributing
This discussion board software is open-source, and written in the D programming language. Contributions are welcome. You can help improve this software by reporting bugs, feedback, and submitting pull requests. Patches for fixes, improvements, documentation, unit tests, refactoring, etc. are all welcome.
To start working on DFeed, clone the GitHub project, and check the instructions in README.md to get started.