Better forum

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 12:07:31AM +0100, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 05.12.2012 23:40, schrieb js.mdnq:
[...]
> >IMO, the only downside is supporting legacy users who refuse to make
> >the transition. I think they are just being hard headed though...
> 
> I hate web forums with passion, they all suck compared to the browsing
> experience most NNTP clients offer.
> 
> I can browse threads just with keyboard navigation, follow discussion
> threads, mark/unmark all I have read, save discussions for posterity,
> all with a standards compliant network protocol free of walled garden
> data servers.

Finally, a voice of reason!


> As for spam, that is what moderation is for, if ever needed.
> 
> I am a firm believer that users of web forums can only find them
> better than Usenet, because they haven't experienced Usenet in its
> golden days.
[...]

Yeah, what is left of Usenet these days is not even a faint shadow of
what it was back in the day, nor a representative indicator of the
soundness of its paradigm. 

I alluded to protocol over application earlier, and perhaps it's worth
belaboring the point. The reason the Internet even exists today is
because somebody had the sense to realize that relying on a specific
software application simply will not cut it. It's not scalable, not
interoperable, and not practical on any non-trivial scale. Instead of
forcing everything and everyone to conform to a single software
application and a single way of doing things, a set of powerful generic
protocols were designed. By standardizing on the protocol rather than
the software, an entire field was opened up: it doesn't matter what OS
or software you're using and what OS or software I'm using, as long as
they speak the same protocol, they're automatically compatible. You can
have a hundred completely different OSes, twelve hundred completely
different software applications all by different vendors, but by virtue
of their speaking the same protocol, they can interoperate. And they
will continue to interoperate with *future* OSes and software that
haven't even been dreamed of yet, as long as the same protocol continues
to be used.

Had the designers of the internet back in its embryonic stages decided
to standardize instead on a specific set of software programs from a
single vendor that can only communicate amongst themselves, the internet
wouldn't even *exist* today. Version incompatibilities, program bugs
that become depended on (and therefore unfixable), non-interoperability
with anything but software developed by that one vendor, etc., would
have killed off the internet years before it became the internet.

All web forums assume (1) you're using a browser, (2) your browser is
GUI-based, (3) your browser is configured with certain minimal features
like Javascript, cookies, etc.. There is (1) no way to use anything
*other* than a browser (and a *graphical* one to boot -- it's so painful
to use with a text browser you might as well be talking HTTP with a
magnet, a pair of tweezers, and a really steady hand holding a cat5
cable) to use the forum, even though forums themselves have no inherent
need for the bloated monstrosities that today's browsers have mutated
into, (2) no way to access the forum data directly -- it's walled behind
the guises of a graphical UI-centric paged interface designed for GUI
users' consumption, and therefore inconvenient or just plain impossible
for programs to work with directly, which results in (3) you *have* to
use that interface to access that data, and if that interface is hard to
use or buggy, well, life just sucks, deal with it.  IOW, (4) you cannot
easily archive posts, sort them by thread, navigate them
programmatically, back them up en masse in your personal archives.  To
make things worse, (5) the single UI that you have no choice over
usually has a totally dainbramaged search function that doesn't even
hold a candle to a full-powered regex search engine that a text-based
NNTP client is capable of. Not to mention bandwidth-wasting with
nonsense like logo graphics and other needless eye-candy, which is
totally worthless when what you want is *information*. HTML, especially
the kind used in web forums, is dismally low in signal-to-noise ratio.
Most of it consumed with visual tags and presentation (and most of the
rest of it with baroque boilerplates mandated by W3C that are just
copy-n-pasted everywhere anyway) which are totally useless when what you
really care about is the *meat*: the text of the forum posts.

With NNTP, you can (1) use a text-based client, like I do, and be able
to navigate 5000-post threads with ease, WITHOUT needing to touch the
rodent; (2) use the web interface on dlang.org, which some really smart
people have put together in a very usable way for those who prefer GUIs;
(3) use an automatic archiver; (4) run your own NNTP backup server; (5)
telnet to port 119 and talk to the server directly ;-); and (6) any or
all of the above as you please.

It's the protocols that matter. It's the protocols that build
infrastructure. Walled-garden web forums are just an anachronism to the
pre-internet days of gratuitous system incompatibilities, inability of
interoperating, and pointless turf wars over which program is "better"
(hint: they *all* suck). Just ask Nick about github sometime. :-P :-P

I'll shut up now.


T

-- 
Век живи - век учись. А дураком помрёшь.