TDPL a bad idea?

[Gareth Charnock]

Mike Parker wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>>>> I've thought about building such a system for these forums many times.
>>>> Registration would not be required to post, but registering would 
>>>> enable
>>>> features like voting on posts, establishing a profile, preferences, 
>>>> etc.
>>>
>>> That sounds awesome. Another useful feature would be storing session 
>>> info in the profile such that if I read a post at work the post will 
>>> be marked as such when I use a different computer/news-reader like my 
>>> home PC.
>>
>> Yup. What I hate about reddit/slashdot/ycombinator is there's no way 
>> to mark ones I've read as read. On a long thread, it's really hard to 
>> see if there's anything new.
>>
>>
>>> wouldn't it be easier to just use web forums (there are many existing 
>>> system with all the bells and whistles) and write a news-gateway for 
>>> it than to implement all the features for the current news-server? 
>>> it'll also fix the currently broken web interface for the NG.
>>
>> They all suck. Sorry.
>>
>> Most use far too much vertical space, spreading the thread out over 
>> multiple pages, or don't indent a threaded view. And *none* of them 
>> have the ability to mark what you've read.
> 
> Most of the web forums I use can be configured per user to determine how 
> many threads to show on one page, or how many posts to show in the 
> thread per page. All of the popular forums these days have features to 
> mark posts as read, mark all read, show posts since last visit, and so 
> on. My particular favorite is SMF[1].
> 
> FWIW, this is the only set of newsgroups I read. In fact, I thought I 
> had unsubscribed from my last newsgroup in the late 90s, and was a bit 
> miffed to see that D didn't have a mailing list when I first stumbled 
> across it. All of the other development communities I'm interested in 
> offer mailing lists or web forums. I particularly like mailing lists, 
> since I use GMail. It makes a world of difference. Searching through 
> these newsgroups can be aggravating. If we could get on Google Groups 
> I'd have less to gripe about.
> 
> IMO, newsgroups should just die. But I seem to be in the minority here.

Just a quick perspective from someone new here. The fact that things 
were done though newsgroups did put me off for a while (I read the 
though the website and tried the language - D is a fantastic idea BTW - 
but I didn't look at the newsgroups for quite a while because newsgroups 
were before my time).

I actually like the newsgroup format (more than modern web forums) now 
that I've gone to the trouble of setting up Thunderbrid but I guess they 
did put me off initially.

Well, that's one data point for you.