[fpc-other] Offer to repair and maintain the FPC community website (repeat msg, no HTML)

[Henry Vermaak]

On 26/09/12 15:00, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 2012-09-26 14:22, Henry Vermaak wrote:
>>
>> I haven't found a project that uses NNTP for a long time.
> 
> fpGUI  - GUI Toolkit since 2005/6)
> tiOPF  - Object Persistence Framework since 1999)
> OpenWatcom  - C/C++ Compiler,IDE,Debugger,etc.
> Indy - Internet components used by Delphi and FPC.
> NexusDB - Database server split from TurboPower FlashFiler since
>           years ago.
> Embarcadero - all products, announcements and developer areas
> Usenet - Over a 100,000 newsgroups already. Yes, alt.binary is
>        probably the biggest contributor to the 9 TerraBytes of storage
>        requirements, but areas like comp.lang.* is still being used by
>        programmers and IT admins today. Use Google Groups to see
>        recent posts.

Wow, I must have missed them since they didn't turn up in my distro
repository :)  None of the FOSS projects I've worked with have used NNTP.

> ...the lists can go on. You just haven't been paying attention. ;-)

Seems like we pay attention to different things.

> Mobile users tend to use laptops, so no problem there. Alternatively,
> use you smart phone and install a NNTP client there (iOS and Android has
> NNTP clients).

I use a desktop at work, laptop at home.  I may read mail on my phone,
but rarely reply from it.  Using a phone for NNTP will just make it
worse: one more client to synchronise.

> There are lots of benefits to NNTP though:

These are not exclusively benefits of NNTP.

>  - easier to navigate than web forums

Personal taste.  I don't personally like web forums, but I've seen some
that are nice to navigate.  Web browsers are heavyweight clients.  They
are ubiquitous, though.

>  - hierarchy of conversations are standard

Also with email.

>  - you can choose your favourite NNTP client

I can choose my email client.

>  - new users can follow existing discussions by seeing past messages

Archive for mailing lists are standard now.  Some of them don't have
nice interfaces, but they are searchable.

With NNTP, I'm _never_ going to pull all the past messages just because
I want to search them.  So there I need to use the archive, too.

>  - It's a pull medium, not a push medium. So I only see message when
>    I really want to.

I can collect mail when I want to?

>  - a clear separation between my email and project discussions

Email filters, aliases (server side, of course, so that all your clients
see the same messages, no matter from which computer you access them).

Etc, etc, etc.

Do you have a list of _actual_ benefits of NNTP?

Henry