[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell Forum

[Darrin Chandler]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 07:01:45PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> If you have a forum powered by NNTP, you can casually throw in a
> "hey, nice one" time comment as a reply to part of a thread, and
> only people interested in that thread have to see your message (or
> download it, for that matter).
...

> Still, I know from experience that I am the only person here who
> appreciates these virtues. Everybody else seems quite happy with a
> crude SMTP system, so...

IOW, if people use the proper and well known features of NNTP it would
be a better world than the one we have were people do not use proper and
well known features of SMTP.

As it stands, even with SMTP you get people who post new message topics
as replies to existing threads, as well as people who *somehow* "reply"
to a thread but do not include In-Reply-To or References headers so
threading is broken. I have no reason to think people would not do the
same broken things with NNTP, foiling my plans for following some
threads and ignoring others.

As long as people are sharing opinions, I'll add mine:

* If the mailing lists go away I will probably not switch to whatever
  replaces it.
* A list <-> forum gateway is fine, as long as the message IQ doesn't
  drop through the floor as a result. This fear comes from personal,
  anecdotal evidence. YMMV.
* No opinion either way on List <-> NNTP gateway.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://phxbug.org/      |  http://metabug.org/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG Federation