How do you get comfortable with Dlang.org's Forum?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, February 23, 2018 15:03:01 jmh530 via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:55:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > dlang's "forum" is really a newsgroup. It's accessible via
> > NNTP, mailing list, and the web interface. Many of us never use
> > the web interface, and the functionality in the web interface
> > is limited, because all it's doing is posting to the NNTP
> > server and fetching the messages from there to display in the
> > web interface.
> >
> > And none of the features that you're talking about really make
> > sense when you're dealing with NNTP or a mailing list. It's all
> > just plain text.
> >
> > - Jonathan M Davis
>
> With the recent grumbling about receiving newsgroup posts in
> gmail, it occurs to me that I have no idea how to even do that. I
> imagine I could figure out Thunderbird if I bothered, but I
> primarily use the forum.

If you want to use gmail, then just follow the "mailing list" link in the
web interface and sign up. I wouldn't suggest using gmail though, because
it's "helpful" and doesn't deliver an e-mails from the mailing list that you
send to the mailing list. That probably displays okay in gmail itself,
because it probably inserts the messages from your sent folder into the
thread, but if you then ever use an e-mail client, threading is screwed,
because all of your posts are missing. And threading isn't going to be all
that great in gmail, because its threading is linear, whereas e-mail threads
are actually a tree.

If you want to use NNTP, then you'll have to find a tutorial somewhere on
NNTP readers. I used to use KDE's newsgroup reader, knode, years ago, but I
got sick of it not being able to track what I'd read across machines,
whereas if you using the mailing list with an e-mail client set up to use
IMAP, then every machine which accesses your e-mail is synced with regards
to what you've read. I'm not aware of any advantage to using NNTP over the
mailing list, but some folks do prefer to use NNTP, and if you use
Thunderbird, you can use it for either e-mail on NNTP.

Maybe the web interface should have more instructions for using alternate
interfaces, but the mailing list is pretty self-explanatory, and it's not
that hard to search how to use NNTP if you care.

> Maybe the forum could add a read me at the top that gives
> instructions on others ways to access it with a note that most of
> the regular users interact that way (and how this functionality
> leads to things like not being able to edit forum posts). This
> would probably reduce the number of threads like this.

For some reason, the fact that it's using NNTP is only one of the "random
tips" that the front page of the web interface cycles through:

'Random tip: Much of this forum's content is also available via classic
mailing lists or NNTP - see the "Also via" column on the forum index.'

It should probably be more explicit about that. I doubt that it would
ultimately fix the problem of folks complaining about wanting improvements
to the web interface as if it were discourse or something though. That would
require folks to pay more attention than many folks seem to, and the more
text you provide explaining the details, the more likely the are to ignore
the whole explanation.

- Jonathan M Davis