More phpBB like forum?

[dude! sweet!]

wouldn't a web-based news-reader solve this problem? 
I've just did a little search and found: 
a) http://opensource.polytechnique.org/banana/
from the above site: "Banana is a fast (really fast) web-based NNTP library with server side caching "
b) http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-net-nntp - a Ruby NNTP lib. How hard would it be to create a RoR app with this lib already providing you an API to access NNTP servers? Should be simple enough, I think.
3) for all the python lovers here - I'm sure an equivalent python lib exists that could be used with something like django (or whatever the python equivalent for RoR is).

2eurocent, please :)