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

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2012-09-27 10:11, Sven Barth wrote:
> I think Henry meant that differently.

I understood Henry perfectly. I worked like that too. Desktop and work, 
and laptop at home. Maybe our tolerances to what is "brain energy" is 
quite different. Maybe Henry just hasn't bother to learn the shortcuts 
or features of the News client he uses.

Take Mozilla Thunderbird as an example...here are some shortcuts:

    R - mark whole thread as read. If the topic doesn't grab my attention
        this option gets used often.
    N - Jump to next unread message. This jumps across message topics
        too. I also have Thunderbird setup to mark a message as read as
        soon as the message has been opened - no delays.
    C - short for "catch-up". Mark message as read between dates. Great
        for if you have been away on holiday, and don't care about
        old topics.
    \ - collapse all expanded message threads. Quickly giving you an
        overview of what is going on.

There are lots more like these. Then I haven't even touched on message 
filters. eg: I have standard filters in email and news clients that mark 
topics in green if they replied to one of my messages, or it has my name 
mentioned.

With all these, it literally too me <10 seconds to sync my home laptop 
to the same message state I left my work PC. Considering how long it 
takes to actually read and reply to messages, than <10 is hardly any 
effort or "brain energy".

Now these things simply can't be done with Web Forums. 99% of them have 
linear views (think Gmail layout here) or hierarchies (of whole 
messages), and not just a hierarchy of titles. So you scroll and scroll 
and scroll and scroll and scroll.....ZZZZzzzzz...  Oh, and then each new 
topic needs to be clicked and whole web pages need to be reloaded, with 
MB's of images and JavaScript etc, and that is so damn slow compared to 
NNTP clients which just pulls the actual message when you need it. I 
have a 60Mb fibre optic internet connection, and I still think web 
forums are slow!

I don't care how old the NNTP protocol is. The reality, even after 30+ 
years, is than Newsgroups are still miles ahead of the current 'web 
forums' idea.


       Graeme.