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[Nick Sabalausky]

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:ja0uk6$26tb$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> I really do not understand why people keep writing replacements for 
> newsreaders that miss fundamentally useful aspects of it.

Probably because it's more than 6 months "old", and isn't "web 2.0" or 
AJAX-y, and doesn't come with the word "cloud" plastered all over it.

But seriously, I think the three things that really hurt NNTP are:

1. There's no user account system.

2. There's no standardized URL system (Seriously?!? Why the fuck not?).

3. Corollary to #1: There's no roaming state: One computer will not know 
what you have/haven't read on another computer. Basically NNTP could use an 
equivalent to IMAP (but with the option of behaving more like POP3 when the 
user desires).

4. With the exception of Opera, no major web browser comes automatically 
bundled with a *real* (ie, non-web-based) NNTP client. (And it needs to be 
fundamentally designed to be multi-user-friendly.)

The only reason we haven't needed #1 here is because NNTP is usually ignored 
these days. If NNTP were bigger, that would become a bigger problem. And I'm 
sure it's at least a perceived problem right now anyway.

Point #2 is just a real [idiotic] problem, period.

Point #3 is a problem when people are using, for instance, a public PC or a 
friend's PC.

And #4 is, unfortunately, a big problem since the people managing public PCs 
are almost always too dumb to know or care that the internet is more than a 
web browser.

Points #3 and #4 are the main reasons all these web-based NNTP clients keep 
popping up.

With all four points addressed, there would never be any good reason for 
anyone to ever use anything but NNTP.