|
 |
On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:38:33 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 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?
Yes, but I am talking about a specific program that front-ends an NNTP
interface using an NNTP gateway.
> 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.
Yes, but it does happen. c.f. NNTP server forums.novell.com, group
novell.community.chat. This is the testing group used at Novell, and it
holds a lot of random chat (with thread drift and so on). There are
*NNTP* threads there that run for several thousand messages (there are
stats as well on this, as one of the moderators of those groups wrote a
program to parse the data stored in the newsreader he uses - Virtual
Access, I think it's called).
> 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.
Well, there again, the NNTP gateway on vBulletin is a generic RFC-
compliant NNTP client. As such, it doesn't care what's on the backend
(Novell use Twister with Cyclone, which are commercial, but they can just
as easily be INN or DNEWS).
> -- insanely long threads --
>
> * Ctrl-Alt-Del forum, "Official I need Help finding a CAD Comic Thread",
> 712 posts.
Tiny. Very tiny compared to the long threads in n.c.c. There was one
guy who wrote a program to just generate replies for the hell of it - and
it ended up being used to test the web-based interface in use at the
time. And it broke it (the front-end provided by the company that does
Twister, in fact).
> 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
Maybe in your world, but Novell don't create a newsgroup per topic posted
in NCC - that would be nuts. There's over 650,000 messages in that group
*alone*, and at one time, it was pegged as the busiest newsgroup on the
'net, with several thousand messages being posted each day.
> * 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.
Simple, the xover file could get quite large, but most NNTP servers can
handle it with enough disk space (spool tends to be the biggest issue).
I wouldn't do it with leafnode. :-)
I mean really, NNTP message linking is essentially a linked list, linked
by reference field. IIRC, the NNTP RFCs specify the first message in the
thread and the last 1 or 2 replies prior to the post itself, but many
newsreaders don't do that or tack on as many references as they can.
Some newsreaders stupidly thread by subject as well (fortunately most can
have this disabled).
> PS: Going off-topic is something completely normal of any
> forum/newsgroup/mailing list/chatroom. Wasn't this thread about a render
> engine? :)
Yep, it was.
I've got many years working with the forums at Novell and most of the
iterations of software they've been through - Hypernews, Proxicomm,
Twister/Cyclone, Twister/Typhoon, and a few tests of some customized
software (KNova, for example, which ended up not being implemented).
And personally, I *hate* web-based forums, but I understand that
sometimes you can only use what's available through your firewall, and
usually that means "web".
The worst are the "flat forums" which are basically message lists (like
buffistas.org, which my wife has participated in in the past - I found
that incredibly difficult to read or follow).
Jim
Post a reply to this message
|
|
