On 03/24/2016 12:50 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> And this is one of the reasons why I've essentially moved from D to
> Rust.

It would be interesting to share a few thoughts about your experience with Rust if you have the time. Thanks! -- Andrei

On 03/24/2016 11:01 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> One possibility is to have the forum software delay actually posting
>> it for 5 minutes, and you can have second thoughts.
>
> That's actually an interesting idea.
>
> Some places on the web (e.g. StackOverflow comments) only allow you to
> edit your posts/comments a few minutes after posting them, so a design
> such as the following would hopefully be less alien:
>
> 1. Upon posting from the web interface, save the post and make it
> immediately viewable to all web interface users (which is the majority).
> 2. Allow the user to edit or delete their post during a grace period
> (e.g. 5 minutes).
> 3. Once the grace period expires, send the final version off to
> NNTP/mailing lists.
>
> Could be configurable (on by default), too. Would require some internal
> restructuring, and adding additional validation for things currently
> taken care of by the NNTP server, but seems certainly doable.

FWIW I like to post and just see it there. On the rare occasions I make a mistake that could make my post misunderstood I cancel the message within seconds and repost it with the fix. (BTW would be nice to have the ability to cancel a message from the Web interface.) If we allow post editing we should allow viewing the history. Generally it's not something I've been missing. -- Andrei

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 03:50:31PM +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 15:26:09 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >The entire reason I've avoided web-based email clients like the plague is because I've yet to see one that handles tree threading correctly
> 
> Oh, I also avoid web-based email clients... though one of the biggest PROBLEMS I have with gmail is that it attempts to thread things automatically!

I agree that trying to thread things automatically where there is actually no relation is extremely annoying.  I have yet to find "smart" software that doesn't do something really dumb.


> I just want everything presented to me, in chronological order. My brain has a storage capacity of more than 800 quadrillion bits and a total linear computation speed of 60 trillion operations per second. It is equipped with sophisticated hardware-accelerated pattern recognition algorithms capable of multi-dimensional spacial processing as well as state-of-the-art natural language handling.
> 
> Most attempts at computer assistance do little beyond hindering the operation of my superior neural net. Just feed me the data!

That's good for you. Me, I don't have the time/energy to devote all of the processing power of my brain just to keep up with a single forum -- I am subscribed to many high-volume mailing lists, and I simply can't keep up with *all* of it on top of all the other (arguably more important!) things in my life.  Tree threading lets me kill entire 500+ post threads in one shot (or any subtree thereof, depending on which part of the conversation is pertinent to me), which is a lifesaver in this age of information overload.  One has to pick his battles, and I choose to only read stuff that *might* be pertinent to my interests, rather than wade through *everything*, especially when a lot of it doesn't even concern me (most of this thread, for example, of which I've only read 1% because, frankly, 90% of it was (probably) off-topic drivel).


> >Without proper tree threading there's simply no way anyone can keep track of things past that point.
> 
> I at least skim *every* post made in the ng, usually close to real time as they come in. The content is then digested and indexed in my brain for future use (and the undigested data is still available through the computer and my local client can look it up by date, poster, content, or yes, the threading headers all with ease)
> 
> I often see people complain about how they find 50 emails a day to be completely unmanageable.

At one point, I was dealing with 4-digit numbers of emails a day. Tree-threading makes it possible to retain my sanity. :-P  (Fortunately, I've reduced my high-volume subscriptions since -- by a lot.)  I guess your mental capabilities exceed mine, but I'm pretty sure that at some point, maybe around the 1000+/day mark or somewhere thereabouts, even you would have to concede that some discussion threads really ought to be outright ignored because they eat up time and energy for negligible gain.


> I've handled an average of about 350 per day, every day, for about six years now. It takes about 10% of my work day, which isn't insignificant, but being aware of what's going on - sometimes, one person's problem today is my answer tomorrow - brings benefits in excess of the cost.

Unfortunately, I don't have 10% of my day to devote to wading through email. There are far more important things in my life than that!


T

-- 
I don't trust computers, I've spent too long programming to think that they can get anything right. -- James Miller

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 16:50:05 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Not understanding the importance of package managers is another (DUB still not part of official distro?) Compare with Rust's Cargo.

Cargo is a good example of the problem with D. Not because of features (I don't know enough about either to compare) but because Cargo is documented like this:

http://doc.crates.io/

and Dub is documented like this:

http://code.dlang.org/getting_started

Dub is going to be the official package manager, everybody says we should use Dub, but there's no way I could tell someone I'm working with to use it. I won't touch it for that reason. It's not clear to me how others don't see this is a problem.

On 03/24/2016 02:29 PM, bachmeier wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 16:50:05 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Not understanding the importance of package managers is another (DUB
>> still not part of official distro?) Compare with Rust's Cargo.
>
> Cargo is a good example of the problem with D. Not because of features
> (I don't know enough about either to compare) but because Cargo is
> documented like this:
>
> http://doc.crates.io/
>
> and Dub is documented like this:
>
> http://code.dlang.org/getting_started
>
> Dub is going to be the official package manager, everybody says we
> should use Dub, but there's no way I could tell someone I'm working with
> to use it. I won't touch it for that reason. It's not clear to me how
> others don't see this is a problem.

Could you please itemize the issues you found with dub? (FWIW I also sent a list to Sönke a while ago). -- Andrei

On 3/24/2016 9:46 AM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Using old communication software like NNTP is one example of that. Compare with
> Rust's Discourse.

For the curious, an example of Discourse:

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-cargo-target-features/3284

I don't see a whole lot here that can't be done with DFeed (and NNTP), there are some good ideas, though I don't like its lack of nested threads.

On 3/24/2016 10:07 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> Perhaps you could list some particular features you're missing.

A couple things I think would improve the usefulness:

1. Consider the thread view:

http://forum.dlang.org/post/nd1ff7$1mui$1@digitalmars.com

and compare with:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Females_in_the_community._282176.html

The latter contains the first line of the non-quoted text in the message. (I swiped this idea from slashdot). This is real nice because with a lot of messages in a thread, it can give a clue which one to click on. The (n/m) thing is n=quoted lines, m = total lines, so one can not bother with "quote the whole message and add +1 at the end" style posts.


2. Support markdown (not html). The great thing about markdown is it'll still look fine in other NNTP readers.

On 3/24/2016 7:01 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> That's a feature. Tree threading is one of the worst things I've ever seen and I
> wish it would die completely.

Haha, reddit would be unusable without tree threading.

On 3/24/2016 8:45 AM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> That said, I think modern forum software like Discourse strike a good balance
> with linear threads. One key feature being the ability to spawn off a new thread
> from an existing one. This actually fixes two issues at once. One is it actually
> makes general thread size smaller, making it easier to follow a whole thread
> linearly. Second it features built-in support to creating an new topic that
> spawns from a previous discussion. In NNTP you can rename the title, but it's a
> bit of hack, different clients handle it differently, etc.

DFeed handles that rather well. See this thread as a fine example:

  http://forum.dlang.org/post/nd1gaq$1o1g$1@digitalmars.com

You may argue that there are better ways to present this, but it's pretty clear that NNTP is not holding this back.

On 3/24/2016 7:13 AM, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> But then again I've never written a spell checker, so wouldn't
> know. :-)

dmd has a spell checker built in. (!)