The D programming language newsgroup should lift its game
Mike Parker
aldacron at gmail.com
Mon Apr 5 22:45:54 PDT 2010
Walter Bright wrote:
>
>
> Yet I don't have to mess with any of that stuff with a newsreader! I
> don't have to configure it, zoom it, install ad blockers, etc. It just
> works, and since little data is transferred, it's fast, too. I also like
> how it's archived as a bunch of text files.
Conversely, I wouldn't have needed to go out and install a newsreader if
you had used forum software instead of newsgroups. I stopped using them
over a decade ago and didn't expect to have to ever subscribe to one
again. I follow quite a few software projects and development
communities. Out of them all, this is the only one that has a newsgroup.
Even so, it was a long time between first finding D and actually
subscribing. If I hadn't been so enthralled after playing around with
the language, I wouldn't be here right now.
With web forums, any posts I mark as read on my iPhone when I'm on the
bus or subway, or on another computer, will still be marked as read when
I get back home. But if I view the newsgroup's web interface on my
iPhone, I'll sometimes wind up wasting a bit of time when I next fire up
the newsreader at home, clicking through messages I've already seen. So
I don't do that anymore. When I went to the States for three weeks in
February, I didn't browse the D newsgroups at all, because I knew when I
got home there'd be a few hundred messages I'd already seen marked as
unread in my reader. I did keep up with all the forum-based communities
I follow, though.
Most forum software is highly configurable and offers so much more
beyond just the forum threads, such as email notification for important
topics you want to follow, private messages without handing out your
email address, the ability to post images or youtube videos inline,
plugins (on the admin side) and more. Every time I open Thunderbird to
see the D groups, I feel like I'm back in 1995.
Despite all of that, I won't be bothered one way or the other if things
never change. I'm no stranger to newsgroups and I've settled in to using
Thunderbird. But what concerns me is how many people don't come into
the community because there are no web forums. We have no way to know
that. But I know it does happen, because I've done it myself with other
projects.
And, for the record, SMF (and most other open source software) does not
come with ads. Ads are set up by administrators.
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