The D programming language newsgroup should lift its game

[Walter Bright]

Mike Parker wrote:
> With web forums, any posts I mark as read on my iPhone when I'm on the 
> bus or subway, or on another computer, will still be marked as read when 
> I get back home. But if I view the newsgroup's web interface on my 
> iPhone, I'll sometimes wind up wasting a bit of time when I next fire up 
> the newsreader at home, clicking through messages I've already seen. So 
> I don't do that anymore. When I went to the States for three weeks in 
> February, I didn't browse the D newsgroups at all, because I knew when I 
> got home there'd be a few hundred messages I'd already seen marked as 
> unread in my reader. I did keep up with all the forum-based communities 
> I follow, though.

That's interesting, because none of the web forums I've seen allowed me to mark 
a message as read. It's one of the things I like about news readers.

I don't have an iphone, but with its tiny screen I'm surprised that the simple 
textual web interface wouldn't be preferred for it.

(I don't have an iphone because the display is too damned small for my eyes, I 
cannot read the tiny text.)

> Most forum software is highly configurable and offers so much more 
> beyond just the forum threads, such as email notification for important 
> topics you want to follow, private messages without handing out your 
> email address, the ability to post images or youtube videos inline, 
> plugins (on the admin side) and more. Every time I open Thunderbird to 
> see the D groups, I feel like I'm back in 1995.

Sure, the web interface to the news groups is utterly lacking in glitz, but it's 
functional. I know you cannot post images or videos, and I think that would be a 
significant handicap for other topics, but not so much with programming. One 
might suspect it is even an advantage to not have pictures, avatars, etc. :-)

> And, for the record, SMF (and most other open source software) does not 
> come with ads. Ads are set up by administrators.

Ok, I understand.

One thing I hadn't mentioned is the news server is bulletproof and utterly 
trivial to maintain - I essentially do nothing. There aren't even any user 
accounts to deal with. I know this isn't an advantage to the users of it, but it 
is a large advantage to me.

One of the problems web forums have is spam. Ironically, one of the advantages 
of using an obsolete news system is the spammers leave it mostly alone, again 
making it a lot easier on my time.

I'm sure there are people who won't use D because of it, but using newsgroups 
doesn't seem to have impaired the adoption of php.

Anyhow, thanks for spending the time to post your thoughts on this. Based on 
your comments and others here, I at least have improved the access by combining 
it all into a nice table at http://www.digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html, so there 
shouldn't be any trouble finding it now.