George Olson said the following on 06/11/2012 11:54 PM:
I am trying to set up a newsreader for the forums, to make it easier to track threads there than using the web interface.
LOL! yes, I *HATE* reading mail on a web interface. But why NNTP? Email is threaded anyway. The message I'm writing has all the threading information ... you'll see things like References: <4FD6BD8B.20805@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4FD6BD8B.20805@gmail.com> Now I'm not saying this is perfect. There are broken MUA's out there. Lotus Notes is one prime example of a thread breaker. But using Thunderbird in email mode (and yes it can be used in NNTP more and yes I have done that and no I didn't like it) I can see the threads in this and other forums. And yes I can see the times when $EXPLETIVE people hijack a thread. The down side of NNTP to my mind is that it expires. You service provider is the one that decides how long any group stays on his server. With email the articles get delivered and its up to you if an when you delete them. The upside of reading a group by email is that we have a lot of tools for processing email, enhancing the mail readers. More work is being done on the email side than the NNTP side. There are advantages to NNTP. Its 'flood fill' algorithm has been show to be one of the fastest ways to propagate message, provided you are in a high interconnection density setting (or your service provider is highly interconnected). Now I realise that with the universality of the internet that means something different from the days of dial-up service, but its still a matter of choice on the part of your service provider: how many news feed source connections does he have? The protocol's "IhaveGiveme" make it easy to have redundant feeds to guarantee connectivity, but is your service provider taking use of that? if not then there is no advantage over email. The store-and-forward nature of email has costs but it also has advantages. If I turn my machine off, if my service provider goes down, then opensuse.org will just defer my email and try again later. This is why as a "home user" I have a mail box with an "always on" ISP so the mail is sitting there and I have the option of collecting it whenever I want. The capacity of that box is huge because the service provider doesn't care how I use the disk space I pay for. I could go away for six months and all my mail would still be there. Your NNTP messages would long since have expired unless your service provider is very generous. And yes, Thunderbird: I did have it set up as NNTP/Newsreader but didn't like it at all. The Forte Agent newsreader looked good at the client Windows machines I've been forced to use and I'm told that there is a Linux equivalent - is that Pan ? - but haven't tried it. Agent was quite comfortable to use for the company/internal news it was set up for, but that meant three was a homogeneous interface. What things would be like in the wild with people submitting from possibly non-conforming tools that, like they do with email, break threading and other aspects of failing strict conformance I can't say.
Another question would be, what are some people's preferred newsreaders here that will accept NNTP? If I could do it on thunderbird I would, but I could not find anywhere that thunderbird will take NNTP, and it seems that thunderbird only accepts RSS.
I don't believe that to be the case. I've just tried setting it up for my cable ISP ... the default port in the setup screen is 119 ... that's NNTP not RSS -- "It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane." -- Douglas Adams' _So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish_ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org