Females in the community.

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 07:59:09 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 07:54:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/23/2016 8:43 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
>>> NNTP is a dinosaur.
>>
>> Vladimir's D forum software.
>>
>> It doesn't allow editing of posts already made, but it is 
>> otherwise much much better than endless other "modern" forum 
>> software I've had the misfortune to use.

I'm not knocking Vladimir's software. I ditched my newsreader 
some time ago and use the web interface exclusively now. Much 
more convenient. We can debate the usefulness of specific forum 
features that are out there in the wild these days, but the main 
issue is that the most basic features (like editing and deleting 
posts) are not practical when the central database belongs to the 
NNTP server.

>
> BTW, there is no problem with adding the ability to edit posts, 
> except that the edits will of course only be visible to forum 
> users, and not NNTP or mailing list.

Yeah, I get that. But then we're maintaining two separate 
databases. The database for the web interface should be the 
primary, with all of the post meta-data stored together with the 
posts themselves in one place. Then, people who pull the posts in 
a newsreader after any edits have been made will at least see the 
edited posts (still nothing to do for the mailing list 
subscribers, I suppose). It also allows much easier moderation, 
not relying on the news server admin to delete spam and any posts 
that go beyond the bounds of propriety.

I'm not coming at this from a personal perspective, but from that 
of a new D user who wasn't necessarily around during the height 
of the newsgroup craze. More than once I've seen people post here 
looking for a way to edit or delete their posts. We recently had 
a suggestion her for a means of marking threads as important or 
useful. These are the sorts of thing that people *expect* today, 
whether everyone finds them beneficial or not. It's just one more 
thing about the D community that doesn't jibe with expectations, 
like the way the web site looked before the revamp. It's not a 
major issue in and of itself, just an annoyance and a lack of 
convenience, but taken together as a part of the whole it's one 
more point of complaint. One that could be easily resolved.