> I visit half a dozen programming forums

In fairness to NNTP, you'd only have to check your inbox in one place rather than visit 6 different forums. That's where my "collate-bits-and pieces-from-different-forums-and-merge-them-into-one-mega- personalized-mega-forum" idea would come in useful if it existed.

Gregor Richards wrote:
> Daniel White wrote:
>> However, for many people who don't have these readers (and don't want
>> to try one yet)
> 
> Waitin' 'til '91 or so to see if this whole "Internet" thing pans out?
> 
>  - Gregor Richards

Actually Gregor, the opposite is true. You're implying that anyone should have a newsreader by now, but in fact, my generation knows little about newsgroups, since by the time we came on the scene the internet had passed them by in favor of html based forums.

Do a census of 26-19 year olds, even tech-savvy ones, and you wont find a significant portion with the capability or know how to browse newsgroups.

>  I visit half a dozen programming forums
Can I ask which those are?
(Check to see what I am missing :)

Kyle Furlong wrote:
> Actually Gregor, the opposite is true. You're implying that anyone should have a newsreader by now, but in fact, my generation knows little about newsgroups, since by the time we came on the scene the internet had passed them by in favor of html based forums.
> 
> Do a census of 26-19 year olds, even tech-savvy ones, and you wont find a significant portion with the capability or know how to browse newsgroups.

When my dad was in the Air Force during the Vietnam war, they had to bring a bunch of prop transports back from retirement into service. They had one the mechanics just couldn't get the engines to run right on. They studied the manuals, and did everything they could think of, yet the engines just didn't put out the power they were rated at.

The Air Force finally dug up an old grizzled mechanic out of retirement to come have a look. He listened to them run for a moment, then fixed them up promptly. There's a lot of knowledge about those machines that never made it into the manuals.

Somehow, though, I doubt anyone is going to pay me for my leet skillz at 16 bit DOS programs ever again :-(

Reply to Walter,

> Somehow, though, I doubt anyone is going to pay me for my leet skillz
> at 16 bit DOS programs ever again :-(
> 

If anyone does, you can send it to the daily WTF.

Reply to Mike,

> Brad Roberts wrote:
> 
>> For me, it's not about speed, it's about push vs pull.  A forum that
>> I have to actively go to to find out if there's new material is
>> wasteful.  I
>> 
> In my case, it seems wasteful to use a newsreader just to check the D
> ngs. I do everything from my browser except checking these newsgroups.
> I check all of my email accounts through gmail, I visit half a dozen
> programming forums, I check reddit for interesting stuff, and so on.
> If it weren't for these D newsgroups, I'd have no reason to open
> Thunderbird anymore.
> 
> In fact, before picking up D I hadn't used a newsgroup reader in years
> and didn't miss it a bit.
> 

How long does that take you? I start two programs opening (TB and my NG reader) and go chat with my boss at the start of each day. A few minutes later my computer shows me a list of everything I care about (except the sudo-forum Stackoverflow) and I can cull through that an a mater of a few minuets overhead. After that, I basically forget about it till something say I have something to look at.

Yes having more that one way to get your fix is wasteful but the first one to go for me is the /web based/ interfaces.

Sean Kelly wrote:
> I think there must be a generation gap here.  The first thing I look for is a
> newsgroup dedicated to a subject.  After that, a mailing list.  I have basically
> no interest in web forums.

Ah, those whipper-snappers with Twitter accounts!!

(Is there anything more useless than twitter?)

Reply to Walter,

> (Is there anything more useless than twitter?)
> 

Anything that can end with a hotfix from M$ is not useless!

http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/10/sql-2008-upgrade-tuning-for-stackoverflowcom/

Denis Koroskin wrote:
> But those users who visit digitalmars.D just to know if there are any interesting topics discussed or to ask a question once in a while prefer traditional web-based interface. In fact, these newsgroup have great amount of useful information, but you have to fetch all the messages for doing a search over them by a keyword (my messages cache is about 800Mb!). This is hardly possible for a newcomer. OTOH, any decent forum has a search functionality built-in.
> 
> I believe that both should coexist, but a better integration between them is needed for sure.

There are the archives, updated weekly, at: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/

It even has search!

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Kyle Furlong wrote:

> Gregor Richards wrote:
> > Daniel White wrote:
> > > However, for many people who don't have these readers (and don't want
> > > to try one yet)
> > 
> > Waitin' 'til '91 or so to see if this whole "Internet" thing pans out?
> > 
> >  - Gregor Richards
> 
> Actually Gregor, the opposite is true. You're implying that anyone should have a newsreader by now, but in fact, my generation knows little about newsgroups, since by the time we came on the scene the internet had passed them by in favor of html based forums.
> 
> Do a census of 26-19 year olds, even tech-savvy ones, and you wont find a significant portion with the capability or know how to browse newsgroups.

Survey that same set and you'll also probably find a high percentage that can't:

1) describe what pointers are

2) describe how hash tables work

3) tell you any detail about how network routing works

4) describe how email routing works

...

The list goes on.  It hardly proves any point that there's a segment of a population that doesn't know how to do something.

I haven't yet seen a forum that does as good a job as email does for monitoring traffic in a discussion or set of discussions.  That includes nntp to a large degree.  I acknowledge that user requirements differ though.

I'd be happy enough with a forum that allowed me to configure my account to automatically send every message posted to my email address with proper threading headers and additionally handled properly me replying to the emails and having them show up appropriately via the web pages.  So far, I've not found that to exist (admitedly with rather little investigation). Most allow you to tag threads to be watched, but don't deal with new topics/threads/whatever.  And most don't support bi-directionality.

Given one that supports both of those two main features, all three of nntp, mail, and forum could easily be stitched together.  Setup the forum software, subscribe it to the mail lists I provide.  Those already gateway to/from the newsgroups.  Icing on the cake would be removing redundancy of data stores, but that's less important, imho.  Additionally, backfilling the duplicated datastores would be nice, but not required.

So, if you're passionate about using forum software, find one that meets the requirements and get it setup.  It doesn't need to be some mythical 'someone' doing it on behalf of those that want it.  Do it.  Get it working.

Later,
Brad