TDPL a bad idea?

[Mike Parker]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>>> I've thought about building such a system for these forums many times.
>>> Registration would not be required to post, but registering would enable
>>> features like voting on posts, establishing a profile, preferences, etc.
>>
>> That sounds awesome. Another useful feature would be storing session 
>> info in the profile such that if I read a post at work the post will 
>> be marked as such when I use a different computer/news-reader like my 
>> home PC.
> 
> Yup. What I hate about reddit/slashdot/ycombinator is there's no way to 
> mark ones I've read as read. On a long thread, it's really hard to see 
> if there's anything new.
> 
> 
>> wouldn't it be easier to just use web forums (there are many existing 
>> system with all the bells and whistles) and write a news-gateway for 
>> it than to implement all the features for the current news-server? 
>> it'll also fix the currently broken web interface for the NG.
> 
> They all suck. Sorry.
> 
> Most use far too much vertical space, spreading the thread out over 
> multiple pages, or don't indent a threaded view. And *none* of them have 
> the ability to mark what you've read.

Most of the web forums I use can be configured per user to determine how 
many threads to show on one page, or how many posts to show in the 
thread per page. All of the popular forums these days have features to 
mark posts as read, mark all read, show posts since last visit, and so 
on. My particular favorite is SMF[1].

FWIW, this is the only set of newsgroups I read. In fact, I thought I 
had unsubscribed from my last newsgroup in the late 90s, and was a bit 
miffed to see that D didn't have a mailing list when I first stumbled 
across it. All of the other development communities I'm interested in 
offer mailing lists or web forums. I particularly like mailing lists, 
since I use GMail. It makes a world of difference. Searching through 
these newsgroups can be aggravating. If we could get on Google Groups 
I'd have less to gripe about.

IMO, newsgroups should just die. But I seem to be in the minority here.