On Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:59:57 EDT, Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> and in all those years no NNTP server ever appeared as open source that
> also supported a web forum software, which, iirc was the original hope
> when developing this stop-gap solution.

There have been a few web forum platforms that have had NNTP connectors, 
however.  I used to help admin a vBulletin system, and there was an NNTP 
plugin there that ran a bi-directional polling routine every 10 minutes or 
so. (Arguably, vBulletin wasn't open source; it was written in php, but to 
use it required a paid license).

More recently (relatively), there has been a plugin for Discourse, however 
it hasn't been maintained in a few years and to my knowledge, is no longer 
compatible with the current releases.

There was also hypernews IIRC.  Though all I have been able to find 
suggests it had an e-mail gateway but not NNTP.  But when I was involved 
in the forums at Novell, NNTP users were a big part of the audience back 
in the day (90s and early 2000s), and we used hypernews for a short period 
of time (and absolutely hated it).

A big part of the challenge is that there are so many different nntp 
server platforms out there; inn is an open source option, as is dnews, but 
configuring them properly is challenging unless you've done it before (inn 
in particular is difficult to set up securely correctly). Other platforms 
(I had worked with a proprietary one from Highwinds that had a high-
availability clustered configuration) have lots of different options, but 
the implementation of the core NNTP protocols could also vary 
significantly - particularly things like XOVER and other extended 
commands.  So a web-based forum implementing something could only ever 
really implement the most basic set of commands, and handling things like 
superseding messages and cancel messages was very hit-and-miss (for 
vBulletin's connector, cancel was implemented, but not supersede).

One of the successors to the Novell forums that I worked on is the 
openSUSE community, and we eventually dropped NNTP (to the chagrin of a 
small group of users - which included myself) because the effort to 
maintain the code ourselves wasn't in the cards for us given the very 
small number of users who still used it.


-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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