Jim Henderson escribió:
> On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:51:31 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
>> None of those forums have proper threading. People add their posts to
>> threads, they don't reply to other posts. Converting that to a tree like
>> it's shown on newsgroups wouldn't work at all.
> 
> Actually, it can be configured to work properly with NNTP - I'm in the 
> process of converting some private newsgroups to use that as a web 
> interface.
> 

It's more about how people use it than technical issues. If the web 
interface has such a thing as "reply to this *thread*", people will 
click on it; and where in the tree would that post go?

Also, really long threads (see below) are "wrong" in newsgroups... 
Clients aren't really designed for that; for example, Thunderbird 
doesn't let you collapse individual posts; only the first level of 
nesting (threads) can be collapsed. Again, not technical reasons (the 
protocol isn't really "limited" in terms of posts-per-thread at all); 
it's just annoying to browse a 10000-post thread with news readers.

By the way, the forum->nntp linking I'm doing involves writing the NNTP 
server itself, since I didn't find any code flexible enough to let me 
stick any backend. POV-Ray uses DNEWS, but it's commercial software. I 
found one that seemed to have the same goals as me (interface with 
forums) but it's written in Python, and I don't know a single thing 
about it.

-- insanely long threads --

* Ctrl-Alt-Del forum, "Official I need Help finding a CAD Comic Thread", 
712 posts. In a sane NNTP server, it would be done by setting a whole 
group for those kind of requests, and each comic request would go on its 
own thread, with one or two or five replies, but not much more.
http://www.cad-forums.com/showthread.php?t=47935

* RCN BOINC project forum, Cafe category, "Last one to post here wins", 
15135 posts at the time of this writing. Thread grows just for the hell 
of it. I think no BOINC project lacks such a thread, with usually all 
the same people :)
http://dist.ist.tugraz.at/cape5/forum_thread.php?id=12

I was told SETI@Home once had one of those "last to post wins" threads 
reach *two hundred thousand posts*. An admin deleted it because it was 
loading the database more than *anything* else (the forum software has 
no paging; you can only get either the last X posts or the whole thread).

* And an even worse thread, again in Ctrl-Alt-Del forum. "The Official 
Chat Thread". It's exactly what it sounds like: abusing a forum for 
chat-like conversation. 76391 posts at the moment.
http://www.cad-forums.com/showthread.php?t=74371

Imagine those three in NNTP.

PS: Going off-topic is something completely normal of any 
forum/newsgroup/mailing list/chatroom. Wasn't this thread about a render 
engine? :)

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