OSDev.org

Combuster wrote:If its so easy, I invite you to teach my grandma.

Not before you tech her to read a forum

Apart from that,
1: You know nothing better than to use usenet, so yes, you used it in ancient times.

No comment.

2: Many people have hotmail or other web-only mail.

Hotmail has MS Exchange and POP3. Or at least it had the last time I bored to use it.

3: Usenet comes without FAQ.

Most newsgroups have a FAQ, indeed. It's not harder to teach someone to use the newsgroups than to use a web forum. The *real* point is: instead of telling people "go to outlook, add a NNTP account, and subscribe this", they tell "fill in this form, wait for an e-mail message, click on it, and post".

JJ

Not before you tech her to read a forum

She can. Because it's obvious how it works.

The problem is, you still never explained the following phenomenon:
1) Everybody with some internet experience can use a forum. Practicaly nobody except ubergeeks use a newsgroup.
2) It took me almost no time to learn how phpbb worked, while it took me a full day to get access to usenet (using google groups, which is pretty much cheating IMO), add to that that I was older, had obtained a CS degree, google skills.
3) I followed a course called "Human computer interaction". If I'd submit the first usenet program, it would get me a horrible fail grade, if I'd submit the first piece of forum software, I'd ace it.

You too, young padawan, must learn that userfriendliness is more important than technological quality.

Let's say I follow the instructions of Thunderbird, Win Mail, etc to the letter, and put my real email address and full name into my Usenet configuration. I'm almost guaranteed to get spam. If I do the same, and put my real name and real email address into a forum (like this one), I don't get any spam at all.

Usenet was invented back in the glorious days when spam was not meat. Now, unfortunately, spammers get us at every corner. The thing is, you shouldn't have to not follow the instructions to get it to work properly.

@ JJeronimo:

Regarding "thread support", there are web forums that track who replied to whom, too. Any discussion splits up in subthreads almost immediately, with points being repeated in every subthread and the whole thing being a PITA to navigate. Which is probably why that kind of forum is so popular e.g. on Slashdot.

Google Groups is not a solution, because that simply trades one web interface with another - you're still stuck with your textbox, only that the maintainer doesn't have any choice on the interface anymore.

Talking about how "a more WYSIWYG approach" would benefit forum editors, and mentioning NNTP as the better alternative in the same paragraph, should strike even you as a bit ridiculous. Yes, WYSIWYG in NNTP - because it's text-only...

There is no quoting standard on NNTP. There is some consent to use nested ">", but even then everyone has their own idea whether to use ">" or "> ", and each NNTP client has its own way to add information as to who made that remark (starting at "XYZ wrote..." and going all the way to witty three-line headers). It's not the silver bullet, in the very least.

I think quoting is easier on Usenet because it facilitates splitting your quoted text into logical parts, to which you can answer separately.

What you describe here has a name in the minds of many people, namely "flamewar-style quoting". Taking a statement apart word by word to prove you're right and the other one is wrong. (Or that you're wittier than him.) I'm guilty of using that style myself far too often - because I learned to walk the cyberspace on Usenet, that's why, and I'm not really proud of that part of it...

Now, I here you asking: "how many times have you needed to enter a tab in a forum?". My answer is: few. But when I do, this fact doesn't make it less irritating (in fact, I tend to use many tabs while writing source code in this forum).

And Google Groups is better?

I'd find it rather irritating to use an NNTP client that would not send the focus to the next widget on tab-press. It's how GUIs work, isn't it?

Also, about the quotes once more, one proof about BBCode being a bad idea for quoting is this screenshot of the edit window I'm writing on...

Try line breaks. They're free, you know?


Personally, I wouldn't ask the maintainers to spend more of their spare time to satisfy the few. If I would, I'd probably be friendlier about it, or perhaps offer to do it for them...

Solar wrote:Talking about how "a more WYSIWYG approach" would benefit forum editors, and mentioning NNTP as the better alternative in the same paragraph, should strike even you as a bit ridiculous. Yes, WYSIWYG in NNTP - because it's text-only...

What I said was:

- it was abstracted by the user interface (for example, automatically replacing word surrounded by asterisks by the correct BBCode, or a more WYSIWYGish approach)

IIRC, I was commenting BBcode, not comparing it to the Usenet "counterpart".

There is no quoting standard on NNTP. There is some consent to use nested ">", but even then everyone has their own idea whether to use ">" or "> ", and each NNTP client has its own way to add information as to who made that remark (starting at "XYZ wrote..." and going all the way to witty three-line headers). It's not the silver bullet, in the very least.

Yes, but it's the de facto standard. The small differences aren't important, really. Apart from a few newsreaders that indeed use much different conventions by default, the differences are minor.

I think quoting is easier on Usenet because it facilitates splitting your quoted text into logical parts, to which you can answer separately.

What you describe here has a name in the minds of many people, namely "flamewar-style quoting".

Funny. But I don't agree with it.

Taking a statement apart word by word to prove you're right and the other one is wrong.

It's called "argumentation", and it's one of the core features of democracy.

(Or that you're wittier than him.) I'm guilty of using that style myself far too often - because I learned to walk the cyberspace on Usenet, that's why, and I'm not really proud of that part of it...

I don't like top-posting. People often forget parts of the original message and it's not much useful, because I've already read the original message, thanks.
Even being valid that you're not always argumenting when you are in a message board [alike] place, inline-replies is still helpful in the cases when you aren't [argumenting].
And you don't need to use inline-replies. The Usenet convention for quoting only facilitates that reply style, it doesn't impose it.

Now, I here you asking: "how many times have you needed to enter a tab in a forum?". My answer is: few. But when I do, this fact doesn't make it less irritating (in fact, I tend to use many tabs while writing source code in this forum).

And Google Groups is better?

Google groups is not exactly what I would call a normal newsreader (it's not even a newsreader), so this short sentence is completely void.

I'd find it rather irritating to use an NNTP client that would not send the focus to the next widget on tab-press. It's how GUIs work, isn't it?

You would? Would you then find it irritating to use a text editor that would not send the focus to the next widget on tab-press?
No? In that case, I don't understand why... After all, It's how GUIs work, isn't it?

Also, about the quotes once more, one proof about BBCode being a bad idea for quoting is this screenshot of the edit window I'm writing on...

Try line breaks.

Already tried. In fact, it was my default, not a "trial".

They're free, you know?

Erm... didn't know, really. In my computer/browser the price is a really bad appearance in the final result, with unbalanced spaces between blocks of text.
But perhaps your browser renders it differently, I don't know...

Personally, I wouldn't ask the maintainers to spend more of their spare time to satisfy the few. If I would, I'd probably be friendlier about it, or perhaps offer to do it for them...

I'll not ask the maintainers to spend time with the tab problem because it's a minor problem, and because it would imply not using a web interface. As this is a forum, by definition it uses a crappy web interface. If it stopped using a web interface, it wouldn't be a forum anymore.
But this is not my point at all, indeed.

JJ

JJeronimo wrote:But this is not my point at all, indeed.

I'm tired of this discussion. Can we stop it?
Yes, I know it was me who started, but none of us will be able to convince the other, so it's doomed to become more and more tiresome...

Combuster wrote:3) I followed a course called "Human computer interaction". If I'd submit the first usenet program, it would get me a horrible fail grade, if I'd submit the first piece of forum software, I'd ace it.
You too, young padawan, must learn that userfriendliness is more important than technological quality.

Thanks for reminding me this, Combuster. It's true that I'm not very clever at the subject of user-friendliness (and there's a course with that name in my university), and it's true that technological quality alone means nothing.
However, user-friendliness must not be taken to an extreme where we consider technological-advance==user-aggressiveness. I think this is just another anti-nerd stereotype!
Also, usenet clients have evolved, too, since the first was conceived.

I'm just used to both the models and, as such, I think I have some authority to comment the subject and compare the paradigms (like Solar has). Please, don't take me wrong: I don't think the forums are populated by retarded people, nor I think the news are populated by god-like people who are kings of good netiquette practices and of wisdom.
In fact, people that post in Usenet are often bound ten years ago, when (as someone said) there was no spam and digital image was considered an expensive technology. I don't believe, however, that web forums incarnate a proper fix/replacement for the problems the news posed, and I justified my view in my first port in this topic.

I mean: the usenet has problems that ought to be solved. The alternate model (the forum), however, fails in the essential because it lacks some features that previously were present and were pretty far from being classifiable as useless.

JJ

JJeronimo wrote:It's called "argumentation", and it's one of the core features of democracy.

This isn't a democracy, it's a hierarchy... now bow down and kiss the feet of your supreme overlords.

Note: The opinions expressed in this post, were intended for this topic alone, JJeronimo exceeds me in both rank and stature.

Brynet-Inc wrote:Note: The opinions expressed in this post, were intended for this topic alone,

No, they weren't. The fact that someone posts in a web-forum doesn't mean he loves the idea of webforums.

JJeronimo exceeds me in both rank and stature.

Didn't understand this one.
Is the rank the number of stars? You exceed me, then.
In number of posts, you exceed me too.

JJ

Looks like you botched that quoting attempt pal, you're seriously overplaying the complexities of BBCode.

Lookie Lookie, I find cookie.

As for the rank/status thing, I think I got you confused with someone else... the stars are only an indication of my post count - That's quantity, not quality.

If you look at the History of OSDev you'll see that first a mailing list was used, then newsgroups, then web forums. People could have stuck with either the mailing list or newsgroup approach but for some reason web forums dominate discussion groups.

As soon as there is a RSS module for phpbb3 that provides the right features and isn't in alpha or beta I'll add it to the site. I don't think you should have to use the forum just to read the messages, after all we aren't trying to force ads on people. Posting should require the forum however just because there won't ever be a forum addon that integrates well enough to fix all the formatting, threading, moderation integration issues.

OT: Years ago I wrote a Perl based NNTP reader that would hit multiple NNTP servers and rebuild the threads (I was getting tired of some ISPs missing messages) just so I could provide a web based alt.os.development reader on osdev.org. Even managed to find a bug in how pine handled the thread info and get it corrected.