[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Jul 15, 2007, at 0:47 , Jonathan Cast wrote:

> Usenet is a giant network of NNTP servers (and UUCP servers before  
> that...)
> that ISPs (and various Unix sites before that) maintained at one  
> time (most
> seem to have given up on it now), with thousands of general-purpose
> newsgroups that at one time were the premier online community.

I'll just point out that NNTP is a *terrible* protocol for news  
*readers*; it was originally designed to facilitate linking  
individual news servers.  (The various modern NNTP implementations  
tend to detect readers and switch to a lower overhead NNTP  
implementation which also restricts some things to keep readers from  
taking up too much overhead.)

Somewhat ironically given the origin of this thread, CMU's solution  
was to gateway NNTP to IMAP and require readers to use IMAP clients  
to read the resulting "bboards".

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH