February 03, 2011
On 1/31/2011 5:28 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Adam Ruppe wrote:
>> In the other newsgroup, I've been talking about a little
>> web news program I've been writing as a spinoff of the
>> potential new homepage idea.
>
> That is great news. I've been wanting to do one for years! I haven't
> looked much at yours yet, but here's my ideas anyway :-)
>
> 1. Can use web interface or nntp interface
> 2. web interface looks sort of like reddit, i.e. all posts on a thread
> 3. users can post anonymously
> 4. web interfaces supports logins - logged in users can vote up or down
> on posts
> 5. web interface can mark posts as read or unread - fixing my beef with
> reddit that there's no reasonable way to scan a thread for new posts
> 6. an easy way for moderators to delete spam
> 7. runs on 64 bit FreeBSD (what the Digital Mars server runs on), yes, I
> know that means I have to get 64 bit dmd on FreeBSD working!
>
>
> I can contribute the code that generates the D archive pages from the
> news postings.

I hate to mention this in light of Adam's work, but Reddit is open source--why not run our own deployment of it for D?  It seems that these changes would require minimal changes to the code base, except for nntp access.  But I guess I don't understand the benefits of it over a web-based solution.
February 03, 2011
Eric Poggel wrote:
> I hate to mention this in light of Adam's work, but Reddit is open source--why not run our own deployment of it for D?

I *really* dislike tree style interfaces. I find them incredibly hard to navigate.

Of course, I'm fairly unlikely to use the web interface much anyway (whether mine or someone else - I prefer my mail client most the time), but still, it would be nice if it didn't suck.

Anyway, I did a little more work on my thing this morning:

http://arsdnet.net/d-web-site/nntp/thread-index?newsgroup=digitalmars.D

There's now [Tree] and [Linear] links on the right to view the whole thread at once.


Any ideas on how to improve that? I copied a few basic elements of reddit style sites, but I'm thinking that view works best for very short messages.
February 03, 2011
On Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:16:58 +0000, Adam Ruppe wrote:

> Eric Poggel wrote:
>> I hate to mention this in light of Adam's work, but Reddit is open source--why not run our own deployment of it for D?
> 
> I *really* dislike tree style interfaces. I find them incredibly hard to navigate.
> 
> Of course, I'm fairly unlikely to use the web interface much anyway (whether mine or someone else - I prefer my mail client most the time), but still, it would be nice if it didn't suck.
> 
> Anyway, I did a little more work on my thing this morning:
> 
> http://arsdnet.net/d-web-site/nntp/thread-index?newsgroup=digitalmars.D
> 
> There's now [Tree] and [Linear] links on the right to view the whole thread at once.
> 
> 
> Any ideas on how to improve that? I copied a few basic elements of reddit style sites, but I'm thinking that view works best for very short messages.

I agree.  Subject, author and date should be shown in a tree view, but you should never display more than one message body at a time.  The average message on this forum is far too long for that.

-Lars
February 03, 2011
Am 03.02.2011 22:00, schrieb Lars T. Kyllingstad:
> On Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:16:58 +0000, Adam Ruppe wrote:
> 
>> Eric Poggel wrote:
>>> I hate to mention this in light of Adam's work, but Reddit is open source--why not run our own deployment of it for D?
>>
>> I *really* dislike tree style interfaces. I find them incredibly hard to navigate.
>>
>> Of course, I'm fairly unlikely to use the web interface much anyway (whether mine or someone else - I prefer my mail client most the time), but still, it would be nice if it didn't suck.
>>
>> Anyway, I did a little more work on my thing this morning:
>>
>> http://arsdnet.net/d-web-site/nntp/thread-index?newsgroup=digitalmars.D
>>
>> There's now [Tree] and [Linear] links on the right to view the whole thread at once.
>>
>>
>> Any ideas on how to improve that? I copied a few basic elements of reddit style sites, but I'm thinking that view works best for very short messages.
> 
> I agree.  Subject, author and date should be shown in a tree view, but you should never display more than one message body at a time.  The average message on this forum is far too long for that.
> 
> -Lars

I find it annoying to open each message in a thread manually.
I prefer a fully expanded thread with all bodies (or maybe partially expended by
subthreads or something when it's too big). This makes reading longer threads
much easier.
I haven't found a non-web-based news/mail client that does this yet, but going
to the next message with 'n' in Thunderbird certainly is less painful than
clicking the next message I want to read on a website.

Cheers,
- Daniel
February 03, 2011
Adam Ruppe Wrote:

> Eric Poggel wrote:
> > I hate to mention this in light of Adam's work, but Reddit is open source--why not run our own deployment of it for D?
> 
> I *really* dislike tree style interfaces. I find them incredibly hard to navigate.

I've usually already read major branches and just need the latest posts way down there. I don't care too much how it is displayed but I want to be able to follow a thread. And this was one of Walter's complaints about reddit.

> Any ideas on how to improve that? I copied a few basic elements of reddit style sites, but I'm thinking that view works best for very short messages.

If your are going to do a tree view your going to have to make it more like reddit, only nest so deep.

A reddit frontend for digitalmars.D would be interesting. But their are major issues that would need resolved for it to be good as a news reader.
February 07, 2011
Well, it posted, but evidently still has a few bugs. As you can see, the newlines got butchered with the real data and some headers didn't come out right.

Newlines have been the hardest thing in all of this. They sometimes matter in plain text, but sometimes are just an artifact of wrapping. They sometimes matter in bbcode, but sometimes should be collapsed into the surrounding area.

And, of course, the matter to the NNTP network talk. But, it looks like my code is just collapsing them a little too often.

Other than that, it seems to have worked well, and the reading code for UTF-8 and quoted-printable did good work. One more weekend and we should be set with all the fundamentals. Then, wrap up the gravy and style and I'll call it done.
February 07, 2011
> But, it looks like my code is just collapsing them a little too often.

LOL: the reason it worked in my tests but not for the live post?

\n\n != \r\n\r\n

Stupid line ending bullshit.


But with that fixed, I think all my woes are gone... I'll try the headers again later, but that should be fixed too.

Take a look:

http://arsdnet.net/d-web-site/nntp/get-message?newsgroup=digitalmars.D.announce&messageId=%3Cii592i%24c09%241%40digitalmars.com%3E

You can see the reply form at the bottom, auto-filling bbcode from the original plain text message. Feel free to post as much as you want as long as you do *not* commit to the news server - don't want to spam it until I'm a little more confident in the code...

But if you post to the local database, that's ok. Be aware I delete it from time to time so don't put anything you want to keep.


You might try posting some bbcode, then hit View Original in the upper right. That's the plain text version - what would be posted to the server.

It's fairly beautiful.



btw, the pendulum of my brain swung back to light backgrounds, so it is right now black on white again. I kept the grey code too. Soon enough, I figure I'll just make it user selectable, defaulting to not specifying colors at all, so your browser defaults work.
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