at Saturday, October 12, 2002 2:01 AM, Steve Furlong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was seen to say: > On Thursday 10 October 2002 13:13, Tim May wrote:
> There are two advantages of web-based discussion fora over usenet: > propagation time and firewalls. Not sure about that - propagation time is a issue of course, but a web interface to nntp isn't that hard (dejanews offered it for years) and the propagation issue is "fixed" only by limiting the web forum to a single server or local cluster of servers - if you were setting up a web-based interface anyhow, you could get all the benefits of a single server node while not preventing users not using the web interface from participating. yes, NNTP submissions from other usenet servers might take a while to propagate to the "Master" server (or vice versa) but that wouldnt' affect the web interface users amongst themselves or indeed, anyone using nntp directly to that server. > On the other hand, few discussions are > so urgent that they need near-real-time reparte, and participants > shouldn't be cruising usenet from work. depends on the forum. there are groups I *only* read at work - technical ones of course, related to my job. Usenet is a resource, and at times a good one (provided you can live with the low signal-to-noise ratio). >> More generally, I've been watching the migration of many discussion >> groups over to "Web-based forums" (or fora). Usually the migration >> does not improve the discussion...it just puts dancing ads and cruft >> all over the pages. probably more to the point - *profit-making* dancing ads. > Something like...Google? You can't count on their sweep schedule, but > it does most of what you're looking for. deja-google is ok, but a lot of the more interesting threads include x-no-archive headers (which google respects, and rightly so) somewhere in them, so you have gaps...