On Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:00:01 -0500, in the Looney Labs Geeks Digest: >From: Joshua Kronengold <mneme@xxxxxx> >Olle Johansson writes: >>Unfortunately, it's practically impossible. Yes, you can have >>mailinglists which have html archives where you could post stuff, and >>you could have forums with email integration. >It isn't, really. >The Right Way (well, a right way, and a right easy way) is to use a mail<->new gateway, and >a front end on top of the usenet server to make it look much like a >forum. >In this way, you end up with forum goodness with an understructure >that looks, oddly enough, exactly like email. Actually, the understructure looks more like NNTP, because it IS. But yes, this is the way to get the best of all worlds. Unfortunately, there's a problem: What are you going to use for the web interface? I have yet to see a satisfactory web interface to a news server, and I suspect it's because the "world" has divided into two camps - the people who prefer NNTP, and who would use it, don't put a lot of effort into web interfaces when they write them at all, because they feel that a web interface isn't appropriate for the model, and they just write something that they think should be good enough to get those webglitz forum whiners to shut up, they've got their webforum-style interface. Of course, those ungrateful wretches bitch even more because it's not as good as phpBB or vBulletin, thus making the NNTP-er think 'to hell with them'. On the other side, the forumists won't even try to write an interface between forums and NNTP, and the mail capabilities are only enough to get you to come back to the forums and read and post PROPERLY, through the web interface. They take the position that NNTP and mailing lists are old, outdated technologies, not useful any more, and only old fogeys still insist on using them. And simplicity takes second place to glitz, because everybody has high-speed always-on connections to the net, so why SHOULDN'T they make the interface graphics-heavy? It looks better that way, after all!