TDPL a bad idea?

[retard]

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:08:16 -0500, Roman Ivanov wrote:

> On 2/5/2010 11:52 AM, retard wrote:
>> The sad fact is that web forums are more or less a poor copy of the
>> good old usenet newsgroups. The new format requires more bandwidth and
>> server capacity
> 
> That's a questionable statement. Yes, in a forums you re-download the
> same posts several times. However, in a newsgroup you download them as
> well - inside quotes.

In nntp you only load each post once. In web forums you open the thread 
again and again - reloading the page each time. The document also becomes 
bloated because you need to wrap the text inside html elements. A pure 
xml based dsl would help here, but unfortunately web developers don't 
quite get it (e.g. <article> instead of <div id="article" 
style="foobar">).

I also have experiences with web forum software where the session ends 
before I finish my writing so I need to login twice, once to open the 
thread and second time to have permission to post my reply. If I don't 
relogin, the system might just ignore my post and because of these stupid 
ajax calls, I might not be able to go back to the message writing mode 
anymore. My whole message would be lost. Another web site on another tab 
might also crash the whole browser. So in reality I fire up a text editor 
and write my posts there when starting flame wars on the interwebs.

> 
> Web forums also much more flexible, and have many more features than
> news groups. You can do formatting, post inline images and proper
> hyperlinks for starters. You can easily access them from public
> computers. Also, the developers can extend their functionality based on
> the topic, like adding tags for code folding and laguage-specific
> highlighting. People can edit their posts if they make a mistake.
> Administrators can delete messages. I can go on and on with this list.

Of course those forums are more flexible. But when you have simple 
bikeshedding going on, you rarely need all those. In case of D, the 
syntax often changes and proposals have syntactic contructs that aren't 
part of any language so those <code lang=foo></code> blocks become 
useless.

> 
> In short, if the forum is properly designed, the difference in bandwidth
> is small, while the difference in functionality is enormous.
> 
> I'd probably agree if you said that HTML and HTTP should be replaced
> with better, more modern and efficient protocols _with the same general
> idea behind them_.
> 
>>, has more security holes
> 
> That is not self-evident either. Unless I'm missing something, anyone
> can post under anyone's name here.

I meant nntp servers are rather reliable compared to e.g. php based web 
forum software. Software like phpbb have had terrible security holes. 
Some of the forum software even had plain text passwords some time ago 
when hackers pwned some popular servers.

> 
>> , all kinds of retards posting spam
> 
> I don't think the software is to blame for that. I mean, yes, software
> does have an effect on the kind of people who use it, but there is
> nothing inherent to web forums that attracts the lower grade of users.

Any hacker can write a bot that posts spam on net. So they invented 
CAPTCHA. Agreed, there's spam on newsgroups, too. I guess the largest 
reason why these newsgroups have avoided all that is because Walter has 
his private nntp server and nntp isn't widely used anymore.