On 03/02/2010 09:19, Lutger wrote:
On 02/03/2010 02:42 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
Yigal Chripun wrote:
I've thought about building such a system for these forums many times.
Registration would not be required to post, but registering would
enable
features like voting on posts, establishing a profile, preferences,
etc.
That sounds awesome. Another useful feature would be storing session
info in the profile such that if I read a post at work the post will
be marked as such when I use a different computer/news-reader like my
home PC.
Yup. What I hate about reddit/slashdot/ycombinator is there's no way to
mark ones I've read as read. On a long thread, it's really hard to see
if there's anything new.
wouldn't it be easier to just use web forums (there are many existing
system with all the bells and whistles) and write a news-gateway for
it than to implement all the features for the current news-server?
it'll also fix the currently broken web interface for the NG.
They all suck. Sorry.
Most use far too much vertical space, spreading the thread out over
multiple pages, or don't indent a threaded view. And *none* of them have
the ability to mark what you've read.
I know that at least vBulletin and phpBB can do mark-as-read, it's just
that not everybody uses it. Most of the more 'advanced' forum software
like this however, is stacked with community features and geared towards
markup heavy posting. They would require extensive hacking to adapt to a
more efficient system.
vBulletin also has a (sucky) threaded view btw.
that's the beauty of the proposal, you don't have to use the web forum
interface. you'll continue using your favorite news-reader which will
use the forum back-end to store the messages. all those dis-advantages
both you and Walter mention are in the web forum's UI, not their back-end.
also, I found http://pessoal.org/papercut/ which implements a NTTP
server gateway to phpBB and other back-ends. it's written in python and
would be easy to enhance.
also, I want to emphasize, you can also post with that gateway and it is
not only for reading.
