A real Forum for D

[Kai Meyer]

On 11/29/2011 01:08 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/29/2011 10:52 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Tuesday, November 29, 2011 08:58:59 Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> The iPhone news reader is passable but not great. I can't do usenet from
>>> work though (firewall) so I've long since moved to using Brad's email
>>> forwarder. With IMAP that keeps everything in sync across machines
>>> too. Too
>>> bad most email clients don't do the tree threaded view.
>>
>> Kmail does (which is what I use), and I'm pretty sure that Thunderbird
>> does.
>
> I can confirm that Thunderbird does.
Roundcube Webmail does it as well. Gmail does it too.

There's no reason why we can't use the email forwarder to get a 
web-based threaded view of the news group. But it seems a bit of a hoop 
to jump through for new users.

I think the major complaint is new recruits, and what they are 
comfortable with. It sounds more and more like the features Walter wants 
are not readily available to individuals stopping by for the first 10 
times, unless they are willing to but some time into figuring out (for 
themselves) which tools are best to use news groups with.

I think the new comer is becoming more and more web-centric, and wants 
to have everything run in the browser. I have a hard time convincing 
people to use Thunderbird over Gmail or RoundCube, because they may want 
to check their email on more than one computer, and that next computer 
may not have Thunderbird already setup.

If we want to make new comers more comfortable, there is an argument for 
having a Forum for them. New comers are often sent to D.learn to start, 
and D.learn seems to carry much different conversations than the D 
newsgroup. They tend to be question and answer, which a Forum is great 
for (dare I say created for.) While I sympathize with Walter's desire to 
not create a separate community, there is already a division between 
those who are comfortable posting on D, and those comfortable posting on 
D.learn. I think converting D.learn to a Forum could benefit the 
community by being more attractive to younger/newer programmers. When 
they want to get serious, they can spend the 10 minutes it takes to 
configure an NNTP client, and feel it was time worth spent.

-Kai Meyer