On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:03:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> As of this very moment, my NNTP client (Thunderbird) shows there are 5 messages unread in the left treeview (http://imgur.com/KHnjcnU), and displays in a simple list all 223871 messages ever posted in digitalmars.D with the most recent 5 messages at the top and in bold text (http://imgur.com/uJ2UdzA). As I select each of those unread messages, their bold disappears (they become read). If I get bored and want to mark all news as read, there's a button that does that (or I could select some and mark as read etc).
>
> I use threaded views for e.g. github discussions because once a pull is merged, I archive them all in one shot. But a flat view is a very simple and effective way of staying abreast of what's going on in the forum. Again, I feel I'm missing something given that I'm the only one asking for such.

In the horizontal-split mode, you can press the space bar to jump to the next unread message. Does that help? Or is it imperative that messages are displayed chronologically, without threading?

Unfortunately there's currently no way to mark all messages in a group as read (a technical restriction due to how read messages are stored).

On 3/14/14, 2:12 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:03:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> As of this very moment, my NNTP client (Thunderbird) shows there are 5
>> messages unread in the left treeview (http://imgur.com/KHnjcnU), and
>> displays in a simple list all 223871 messages ever posted in
>> digitalmars.D with the most recent 5 messages at the top and in bold
>> text (http://imgur.com/uJ2UdzA). As I select each of those unread
>> messages, their bold disappears (they become read). If I get bored and
>> want to mark all news as read, there's a button that does that (or I
>> could select some and mark as read etc).
>>
>> I use threaded views for e.g. github discussions because once a pull
>> is merged, I archive them all in one shot. But a flat view is a very
>> simple and effective way of staying abreast of what's going on in the
>> forum. Again, I feel I'm missing something given that I'm the only one
>> asking for such.
>
> In the horizontal-split mode, you can press the space bar to jump to the
> next unread message. Does that help? Or is it imperative that messages
> are displayed chronologically, without threading?

Nothing is really imperative; I'm not asking for features here as much as pointing out what my patterns are. The horizontal split view is pretty nice, I'll use it whenever I don't have my mail client with me. I could probably get used to it but I prefer a flat view.

> Unfortunately there's currently no way to mark all messages in a group
> as read (a technical restriction due to how read messages are stored).

I seldom use that feature anyway so it doesn't matter.


Andrei

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:05:13 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> No. It's a poor workaround.
>
> Andrei

From your previous post I now understand what you want. Thank you.

My work flow was the same as yours when I was using a native NNTP client (Opera Mail in my case). It's definitely an appealing work flow during periods of closely following the newsgroup.

I just wanted to corroborate; I suspect it's pretty common.

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:03:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Again, I feel I'm missing something given that I'm the only one asking for such.

I do it all by chronological order too via the mailing list, at least glancing at every message that comes through, often within seconds of the author's original post!

My guess is most the people who like it this way already have their own news/mail clients set up and don't worry much about the web view. If I had my way, *all* webforums would offer email interfaces! Email rox, disqus sux.

(I use the web thing only for replies, since the mailing list has historically been buggy about keeping the threads intact. I think Vladimir fixed that (or worked around it) on his end but my habit is in place now.)

On Fri, 14 Mar 2014 02:46:05 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 3/13/2014 11:42 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> That may be one reason to use a pre-existing forum software.
>
> It still requires constant attention.
>
> We are not moving away from Vladimir's forum software. It is very fast, it integrates seamlessly with netnews while providing common forum behaviors, etc. And, it provides a premium example of kick-ass software written in D.

I don't disagree, my point was merely if you want voting, and you don't want to reinvent the anti-gaming mechanisms, using another software would be a plausible option.

I personally don't think "gaming" the vote makes much sense. In the D forums, posts quickly fade from memory. If you want to "game" the votes, I don't see what that buys you when nobody remembers that post next week (sometimes even tomorrow!)

> I've never used any forum software that is better (including Reddit). Reddit blows because there's no indication of which comments have been read and which have not, making it very tedious to monitor one thread over a period of time.

Reddit sucks. I personally like disqus for real-time discussion. It has a system of flagging new posts that have appeared while you were sitting there.

I would love to see d forums have more live-update features. It would make it more like a Newsgroup, where you don't have to refresh to see new things, posts just show up when they are posted.

-Steve

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 18:36:26 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/13/2014 11:04 AM, bossfong wrote:
>> Although it might sound very much like a Facebook fanboy, I would really like to
>> have a way to agree to a post/someones opinion without having to go through the
>> (to me tedious) process of writing a reply.
>> I also think this would get rid of the "+1" posts, which I find to be annoying.
>> Another reason why I think a Like/Thanks/Upvote/whateveryouwanttocallit feature
>> would be helpfully is the following:
>
> I would also like a voting system, much like what reddit has. The downside is such a system can easily be gamed. I know reddit has stuff in place to blunt gaming, and such may be beyond our resources to do (it requires constant attention).

I'd like to have a _separate_ voting system, based on GitHub authentication. It would help with processing Phobos inclusion votes and any similar stuff. Voting on random comments has negative communication impact as far as my online experience shows.

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 08:13:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I don't. There's no way on the http forum of seeing new posts since last time I've read them all (something trivial with NNTP). I don't understand how others don't care for that.
>
> Andrei

I miss that too but choosing between better navigation (NNTP) and synced state (web forum) favor the latter because I read newsgroup from variety of different devices and there does not seem to be a way to track read posts on NNTP server.

When I want to skip the topic, I quickly click through it in the plain web view :) Can't say I like it though.

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 12:41:05 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> (I use the web thing only for replies, since the mailing list has historically been buggy about keeping the threads intact. I think Vladimir fixed that (or worked around it) on his end but my habit is in place now.)

I've resolved the problem with email providers cutting off the "References" header. I still need to pair Mailman-generated Message-IDs with their original ones.

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 08:27:11 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
> On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 08:23:39 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> This approach would mean that mailing list users would get an email every time someone upvotes something.
>>
>> I don't think this will work very well in practice.
>
> I'm not suggesting an upvote button. Hopefully it would work just like now, where people usually leave explanatory comments with their +1's.

Oh, sorry - somehow missed that part of your post.

Well, this suggestion carries the problem of turning "+1" into actual syntax recognized by some software and thus encouraging using them :) anyway, I thought the point of voting was to avoid +1 posts in the first place.

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 19:04:17 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 08:27:11 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
>> On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 08:23:39 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>>> This approach would mean that mailing list users would get an email every time someone upvotes something.
>>>
>>> I don't think this will work very well in practice.
>>
>> I'm not suggesting an upvote button. Hopefully it would work just like now, where people usually leave explanatory comments with their +1's.
>
> Oh, sorry - somehow missed that part of your post.
>
> Well, this suggestion carries the problem of turning "+1" into actual syntax recognized by some software and thus encouraging using them :) anyway, I thought the point of voting was to avoid +1 posts in the first place.

If the point is to avoid +1's, I don't think that's possible in a way that isn't either equally intrusive or leaves NNTP users in the dark.