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

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

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.


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


> How do you know it's the most used?

Considering Usenet was launched in 1980 already, has over 100,000 
newsgroups, plus the thousands of private hosted NNTP servers around. 
And yes (as somebody else also asked), I did actually read recently some 
web page about NNTP usage statics. NNTP is still very much used.

> My main problem with it was that you can't
> keep track of read messages across different computers.

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).

If the project you are monitoring doesn't get 1000's of new messages a 
day (I even consider Lazarus discussions small) it is still not so much 
of a problem marking a bunch of message as read. Simple "mark as read by 
date" functionality exists in most NNTP clients (I know Mozilla 
Thunderbird does). Even temporary changing to unthreaded view and 
order-by-date is a quick solution.

There are lots of benefits to NNTP though:

  - easier to navigate than web forums
  - hierarchy of conversations are standard
  - you can choose your favourite NNTP client
  - new users can follow existing discussions by seeing past messages
    easily. Mailing lists fail miserably here.
  - It's a pull medium, not a push medium. So I only see message when
    I really want to.
  - a clear separation between my email and project discussions
  - simpler to prevent spam
  - messages can be cancelled if posted in error
  - offline reading
  - offline searching
  - way faster than web forums
  ...etc


Regards,
   - Graeme -