On Friday, February 23, 2018 15:03:01 jmh530 via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:55:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis > > wrote: > > dlang's "forum" is really a newsgroup. It's accessible via > > NNTP, mailing list, and the web interface. Many of us never use > > the web interface, and the functionality in the web interface > > is limited, because all it's doing is posting to the NNTP > > server and fetching the messages from there to display in the > > web interface. > > > > And none of the features that you're talking about really make > > sense when you're dealing with NNTP or a mailing list. It's all > > just plain text. > > > > - Jonathan M Davis > > With the recent grumbling about receiving newsgroup posts in > gmail, it occurs to me that I have no idea how to even do that. I > imagine I could figure out Thunderbird if I bothered, but I > primarily use the forum.
If you want to use gmail, then just follow the "mailing list" link in the web interface and sign up. I wouldn't suggest using gmail though, because it's "helpful" and doesn't deliver an e-mails from the mailing list that you send to the mailing list. That probably displays okay in gmail itself, because it probably inserts the messages from your sent folder into the thread, but if you then ever use an e-mail client, threading is screwed, because all of your posts are missing. And threading isn't going to be all that great in gmail, because its threading is linear, whereas e-mail threads are actually a tree. If you want to use NNTP, then you'll have to find a tutorial somewhere on NNTP readers. I used to use KDE's newsgroup reader, knode, years ago, but I got sick of it not being able to track what I'd read across machines, whereas if you using the mailing list with an e-mail client set up to use IMAP, then every machine which accesses your e-mail is synced with regards to what you've read. I'm not aware of any advantage to using NNTP over the mailing list, but some folks do prefer to use NNTP, and if you use Thunderbird, you can use it for either e-mail on NNTP. Maybe the web interface should have more instructions for using alternate interfaces, but the mailing list is pretty self-explanatory, and it's not that hard to search how to use NNTP if you care. > Maybe the forum could add a read me at the top that gives > instructions on others ways to access it with a note that most of > the regular users interact that way (and how this functionality > leads to things like not being able to edit forum posts). This > would probably reduce the number of threads like this. For some reason, the fact that it's using NNTP is only one of the "random tips" that the front page of the web interface cycles through: 'Random tip: Much of this forum's content is also available via classic mailing lists or NNTP - see the "Also via" column on the forum index.' It should probably be more explicit about that. I doubt that it would ultimately fix the problem of folks complaining about wanting improvements to the web interface as if it were discourse or something though. That would require folks to pay more attention than many folks seem to, and the more text you provide explaining the details, the more likely the are to ignore the whole explanation. - Jonathan M Davis