On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Tim Starlingtstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Austin Hair wrote:
My ideal, personally, is something more like nntp--and while I'm perfectly happy to turn over the list to some other technology, I don't know that this is the magic solution, and I agree with Tim that it risks killing what good we do have with the existing methods.
I like NNTP too. It has postmoderation, so while you might not be able to authenticate posts, you can at least cancel any that fall outside the rules. It's an open standard which predates the web, and lots of tools and clients have been developed over the years to make use of its many features. It has built-in support for distribution and mirroring. It integrates well with email and lots of organisations run bidirectional gateways.
I agree. The mozilla newsgroups are a good example.
http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?sel=usenet%3Dmozilla
Another benefit is that the mailing list archives can be easily moved to the news server, keeping the history intact.
However, it has largely been forgotten. Most internet users have never heard of it and they don't know how to read it, except when they're shown a web gateway. Mobile developers have apparently never heard of it either, despite the fact that its lightweight nature and time-worn support for low-memory systems should make it a perfect fit.
For postmoderation to work, most people would have to be using NNTP directly, or a web gateway, instead of an email gateway. We'd have to evangelise the clients, say in a footer in outgoing emails.
A quick google search turns up the following NNTP clients for mobile platforms:
Java: http://mobilenews.sourceforge.net/ iPhone: http://inewsgroup.googlecode.com/ Windows: http://www.qusnetsoft.ru/
Google groups is a web gateway to NNTP. I've not tried it from a mobile, but I expect it would be usable.
-- John Vandenberg