Females in the community.

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 3/24/2016 1:41 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> I'm not knocking Vladimir's software. I ditched my newsreader some time ago and
> use the web interface exclusively now. Much more convenient. We can debate the
> usefulness of specific forum features that are out there in the wild these days,
> but the main issue is that the most basic features (like editing and deleting
> posts) are not practical when the central database belongs to the NNTP server.

Ironically, I've used various "modern" forum software that didn't allow post 
editing, either. Post editing has its downside, as well. Replies to a post may 
no longer make sense if it was altered.

One possibility is to have the forum software delay actually posting it for 5 
minutes, and you can have second thoughts.


> I'm not coming at this from a personal perspective, but from that of a new D
> user who wasn't necessarily around during the height of the newsgroup craze.
> More than once I've seen people post here looking for a way to edit or delete
> their posts. We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads as
> important or useful. These are the sorts of thing that people *expect* today,
> whether everyone finds them beneficial or not. It's just one more thing about
> the D community that doesn't jibe with expectations, like the way the web site
> looked before the revamp. It's not a major issue in and of itself, just an
> annoyance and a lack of convenience, but taken together as a part of the whole
> it's one more point of complaint. One that could be easily resolved.

I've used a lot of other forum software on the web, and most of them have 
maddening gaps in their feature set, and have the look/feel of being written by 
dilettantes as their first project.

For example, take a look at the comments for this article:

 
http://mynorthwest.com/813/2938339/Should-President-Obama-have-come-right-home-after-the-attacks-in-Brussels

Note the lack of tree threading, and the very low information density.

BTW, the distributed nature of NNTP I regard as a major asset. The aggregate of 
the forum posts are an immense resource for D, and having it in a central 
location in a proprietary format is pretty risky.

Also, the C++ illuminati communicate via a mailing list (lists.isocpp.org), 
pretty much equivalent to NNTP. So does Linux. We aren't really out of step with 
serious developers. Are they old codgers, or are they on to something overlooked 
by others? Another thing I like about this approach is that posts are restricted 
to text rather than emoji and pictures and pretty styling - i.e. actual content.

It's hard to find any actual content buried in all the noise:

   http://www.cuda-challenger.com/cc/index.php?topic=112797.0

Emojis, no threading, microscopic text font:

 
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/677326-is-there-an-elegant-way-of-writing-straight-hlsl-code-without-preprocessor-macros/

Here's my (yet another) presentation of the NNTP forums:

 
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Choosing_D_over_C_Go_Rust_Swift_278458.html

I'm sure I could improve it, the styling kinda sux.

We're doing just fine with NNTP and Vladimir's forum software.