On Thursday, March 24, 2016 09:39:34 Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> All in all, I'm rather certain that as soon as an actual serious proposal to replace forum.dlang.org with e.g. Discourse appears, it will face just as much, if not more, vocal disagreement.

Not only that, but given how much praise we've gotten for the forum based on its speed and all of the good publicity that we've gotten from that, switching to something else would just plain look bad from a PR standpoint. I'd never have guessed that we'd get good PR out of forum software like we've gotten, but it's obviously been a huge win for us in the PR department.

There are occasional requests for fancier features, and for better or worse, we can't really implement most of them thanks to the fact that the forum is just one interface to a shared backend, but it's not like everyone in here is clamoring for fancy forum features that more popular forum software has. What we have works very well.

So, while it is sometimes a bit annoying to have folks come in here suggesting new forum features, it really doesn't come up much, and it really doesn't seem to be a problem. Maybe we should figure out a way to make it clearer that the forum software is built on top of NNTP so that folks are less likely to ask for impossible features, but overall, what we have is a huge win for us, and I don't see much reason to be concerned about the occasional person who complains about how the forum software isn't "modern" enough.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Note the lack of tree threading

That's a feature. Tree threading is one of the worst things I've ever seen and I wish it would die completely.

Thankfully, we can turn it off here, but it still kinda ruins things because it isolates replies, so the same thing tends to be said over and over again.

> We're doing just fine with NNTP and Vladimir's forum software.

yeah it is good enough for me

On 24 March 2016 at 04:45, Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 03:43:04 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>
> They can't sentences that are incorrect, but that you didn't
>>
>
> And here's an example of what I'm talking about. On this forum, I would normally just let it go, but on a modern forum I can edit my post.
>

I once saw a Giraffe riding my bicycle.

I suspect that detecting grammar anomalies is difficult (such as the ambiguous example above).  But then again I've never written a spell checker, so wouldn't know. :-)

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 06:32:17 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> Come on Adam, I know from previous interactions we had
> that you are way smarter than this.

I could certainly like to see comments like this done away with too. Reasonable people ought to be able to disagree without calling each other idiots (or implying the same).

But I don't feel like arguing this.

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.

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 03:36:42AM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> Many of the things people complain about with NNTP are features I prefer :-)

Same here.


T

-- 
What is Matter, what is Mind? Never Mind, it doesn't Matter.

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 03:01:23PM +0000, Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d 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:
[...]

I like this idea too, even though I only use the mailing list, not the forum web interface. (If anything, it should at least reduce the number of complaints about posts not being editable, that seems to crop up every few months.)

I'm also on another (non-NNTP) forum where posts can only be edited up to 15 minutes after the initial post, and it has worked very well so far. I think anywhere from 5-15 minutes or thereabouts should be a reasonably good default.


T

-- 
Life is complex. It consists of real and imaginary parts. -- YHL

On Thursday, March 24, 2016 14:01:04 Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > Note the lack of tree threading
>
> That's a feature. Tree threading is one of the worst things I've ever seen and I wish it would die completely.
>
> Thankfully, we can turn it off here, but it still kinda ruins things because it isolates replies, so the same thing tends to be said over and over again.

LOL. I would _hate_ to lose tree-threading. I wouldn't read the newsgroup any other way. I don't know how anyone keeps tracks of conversations in a sane manner without it. But I'm certainly not against having alternatives in the forum so that users can choose which way works best for them. And folks using a newsgroup reader or an e-mail client to view the newsgroup have the same choice.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 08:14:07AM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, March 24, 2016 14:01:04 Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > > Note the lack of tree threading
> >
> > That's a feature. Tree threading is one of the worst things I've ever seen and I wish it would die completely.
> >
> > Thankfully, we can turn it off here, but it still kinda ruins things because it isolates replies, so the same thing tends to be said over and over again.
> 
> LOL. I would _hate_ to lose tree-threading. I wouldn't read the newsgroup any other way. I don't know how anyone keeps tracks of conversations in a sane manner without it. But I'm certainly not against having alternatives in the forum so that users can choose which way works best for them. And folks using a newsgroup reader or an e-mail client to view the newsgroup have the same choice.
[...]

Whoa. This is the first time I've heard someone vote *against* tree threading.  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, and tree threading is the only way (at least for me!) to keep track of gigantic discussion threads that span thousands of posts.  As for repetitiveness, it works pretty well if people actually use software that does proper threading so that they can reply to individual sub-threads rather than clump all replies in a single post, which requires a DAG, but DAGs are impractical because past a certain point, the graph starts looking like somebody's hair on a bad day and it's just impossible to sort out which reply came from where. Trees are somewhat limited in what can be represented, but large trees are much more manageable than large DAGs.

On the other hand, perhaps this explains why people here start looking a little lost when threads grow past 500 posts or so. Without proper tree threading there's simply no way anyone can keep track of things past that point.


T

-- 
I think Debian's doing something wrong, `apt-get install pesticide', doesn't seem to remove the bugs on my system! -- Mike Dresser

On 24/03/2016 15:14, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, March 24, 2016 14:01:04 Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Note the lack of tree threading
>>
>> That's a feature. Tree threading is one of the worst things I've
>> ever seen and I wish it would die completely.
>>
>> Thankfully, we can turn it off here, but it still kinda ruins
>> things because it isolates replies, so the same thing tends to be
>> said over and over again.
>
> LOL. I would _hate_ to lose tree-threading. I wouldn't read the newsgroup
> any other way. I don't know how anyone keeps tracks of conversations in a
> sane manner without it. But I'm certainly not against having alternatives in
> the forum so that users can choose which way works best for them. And folks
> using a newsgroup reader or an e-mail client to view the newsgroup have the
> same choice.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>

For me, the jury is still out. Originally I was a big fan of tree threading (together with being able to manually manage read/unread status of posts, like you do in Thunderbird) . I agree that following large conversations without it can become very tricky.

But I also agree it makes it harder to follow the chronological order, and somethings things are mentioned in one post that were already mentioned "elsewhere" in the tree, where "elsewhere" is a more complicated relation because there is no linearity.

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.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros