Then use a threading email client, even Outlook express can do that (view group messages by conversation)
I think email mailing lists are useless for group communication, but threading isn't one of the reasons.
(web forums are just useless.)
Jim.
I wholeheartedly disagree about your statement "this is a bad thing". I say that having authored functional and technical specifications for web and application servers over many years.
Scalability is not an absolute requirement for any design. The question to be asked about any design (web or otherwise) is "will this application meet the needs of the users today, and be able to do so tomorrow?". If the projected number of users can be handled on a single server with an allocated amount of resources then its scalability requirements are met - end of story. The only time you have to invest money and resource in extra scalability requirements is when the actual or projected load on the server likely exceeds the capacity of that server to perform its duty.
At the time of design and initial implementation you may not actually be aware of future scalability requirements. That's fine - the design may have to be re-engineered some time in the future according to new rules that impose themselves. But that doesn't mean that you have to pay a shedload of money upfront for every single system implemented on the offchance that it might be scaled in the future.
In very general terms there's no problem with scalability with web forums IMHO. The number of active users at any one time on any but the most busy forums (and I can't think of any off the top of my head....) is a pretty low number - as in much less than 200. If you've got to scale a web application due to it being unable to deal with 200 online users then I would suspect that the underlying web or server design is crap.
I did not say that changes would not be immediate in every case. On the larger servers carrying a great many users or newsfeeds there is the possibility of a penalty imposed by the server playing "catch up" mode quite frequently. It might be real-time, it might not.
In fact I was under the impression (mistaken maybe!) that the RFCs for usenet allowed for an NNTP server to go offline for a period of time and then come back up and be updated from its sources as and when? That's certainly not real-time.
My apologies - I wasn't intentionally attempting to be patronising so if that's the way it came across I owe you a beer. I don't expect to be discussing with IT experts in this forum. And as computers weren't really around half a century ago I doubt that you've worked in IT since before I was born, sonny ;)
I think the term "it depends" is worth mentioning here. Multiple databases are not by necessity a good thing - indeed, when you get into replication issues they can be a downright pain in the butt. DBAs earn their money through designing and implementing secure replication with multiple database servers - this isn't a toy factory where the country bumpkins get to throw a couple of switches to make it work.
For a large banking system with tens or hundreds of thousands of customers then you would likely need to manage several databases on the biggest servers that bucks can buy, all replicating in real time with stored procedures and business objects etc. But for uk.d-i-y needs? Come on, there's not that many users and I dare say one server with one database worldwide could most likely manage it no problem.
You can base the latter very simply on the number of messages per day. I think worst case we are probably seeing something like 200 messages a day (give or take a few). Your average Pentium 700 could easily manage to handle that amount of data with lots of time to spare. I could very easily run that NNTP newsgroup here on my server for everyone who wanted to use it - only my broadband upstream connection wouldn't be able to handle the load (this isn't a server problem).
? Not sure I follow you on that one. I was using the term "trickle feed" as meaning that one NNTP server on the Internet will feed another by trickling the messages across as they occur, rather than batch them up every 24 hours. If I'm wrong please feel free to correct me, that's the way I understand it works.
The one spanner fits all nuts approach? ;)
Usenet is fine, but there are other alternatives available which serve a purpose. I happen to use a combination of usenet, online forums and mailing lists as appropriate. If you have a mind-block about anything which isn't usenet that's fine by me.
Ah, I spy a non-Microsoft fan. I claim my five pounds ;)
To be honest I wouldn't use web technology for patient-monitoring on any op-sys. The web is fine for interactive work, but if someones heart monitor stops blipping the last thing I'd want is for a web page to pop up in a browser down the corridor saying "I think you ought to get your arse down to cubicle 3 when you've got a minute to spare". Patient monitoring should be about responsive actions tied in with physical alarms and flashing beacons etc.
PoP
To be honest usenet can't manage direct links to other related messages easily either. With a web page you can embed a link to another article very easily, and have that article popup in a separate window just as easily.
Yes I know you can add links - to pop up in a browser! What you can't do is to have your newsreader take off in another forum or thread via a link - easily done with web forums and a browser, not so with usenet newsreaders.
PoP
One of the groups I read was being mirrored on a web forum by a guy swapping the posts from one medium to the other (as a means to make his website look like it had more traffic than it did). This wasn't too bad an idea as the web readers and the usenet readers were both kept happy by using their preferred media but what was a problem was the big difference in posting conventions by the 2, that's what gave the game away in the end. The normal usenet posting rules weren't being applied by the web posters and the whole thing ended up as a mess.
I use Hamster as a local usenet and mail server but also for it's mail 2 news gateway. I subscribe to several mailing lists and all of them are fed to me by Hamster as a normal newsgroup, threading works properly and my replies appear no different to anyone else's as far as other members are concerned. Mailing lists aren't too bad for low volume but when there's a lot of them I find it easier to deal with newsgroups.
That about sums it up, a lot of the screen space used by most of the web forums seems to be given up to icons, emoticons, user ratings etc. Somewhere to the side in a small box is usually about 10 lines of text, a one liner 'me too' and a nine lig sig. I subscribe to one newsgroup that's on a private server, there's no peering issues to deal with and as bandwidth issues across multiple servers aren't a problem it's a small binaries allowed group as well. I do wonder sometimes whether something similar would be of use here as a small picture or diagram often explains things better than a written explanation and there's no problems for those reading the messages offline who can't sometimes click on a pointer to a website.
My newsreader (Turnpike) can do something similar, it can present mail lists to me as if they are a newsgroup, including threading, expiring etc.
Me, I'm all for variety, they all have their place, and people have their own preferences.
I suspect many web users use web forums partly because they have never really heard about or understood what newsgroups are about. Whereas they can find and get to grips with web forums easily enough.
And of course for companies and organisations, web forums are a good idea because they are a draw to get people back to your site.
Thanks Chris - you've reminded me of why Web Fora are a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing: keeps the newbies away from Usenet until their training wheels are off. (And if they never take the training wheels off, all the better for the Rest Of Us ;-)
Absolutely. I actually hold no particular affection for web forums, but was disagreeing with huge's rather limited view.
I'd personally be happy for places like Screwfix to run a news server with even just one newsgroup on it; a lot easier, and viewable offline for those who pay for dialup.
I'm not sure how many commonly used newsreaders allow one to subscribe to varied newsgroups from different servers, and view/read them as a whole. Mine does, but I have no knowledge of others apart from things like the text-based UNIX ones, and ANU News (anyone know that?)
You'll be pleased to hear that this is now client dependant; I'm on a few lists, and I use thebat! (from ritlabs just in case you didn't know, it's not exactly /famous/), and it threads them just fine! It's also rather less prone to "infections" that many others, which suits me just fine! (it can be set to not open anything at all, not to bother with html in the same way that most will, and not to use the infamous address book, all of which can really help with that stuff I have found)
Take Care, Gnube {too thick for linux}
Wassis? I use The Bat here and I hadn't come across this threading malarky. But then again The Bat has soooooo many features.....
PoP
Of indeed any server farm (most websites do not run on Microsoft products :-)
Cheers,
Andy
Crap! Scalability depends on the design and Web based system and usenet based systems could be designed on the same conceptual architecture.
Arguably Web systems could be more scalable since there are more people who know how to write/design powerful web sites than know NNTP at any decent level.
Cheers,
Andy
I can't lay my hands on the statistics right now, but I thought the split was about 50/50?
PoP
It's in "View/view threads by" menu from memory! Hope this helps. Great mail package isn't it? I'll grant you it could take a lifetime to find out how great as there's quite a bit to explore.
They quite recently started doing a server too, and I have to admit to being a bit tempted to explore that too, as my ISP don't really know how its meant to be done apparently, well not for more than five minutes at a time at any rate! ;O)
Take Care, Gnube {too thick for linux}
Netcraft.com is the most popular stats place, but they don't directly give you the figures. However, reading around the stats it doesn't look like anywhere near 50/50 (23.70% is one figure I found for sites running 'NT', which I believe to mean the 'NT and based family of products').
Cheers,
Andy
HP might disagree.
Most online people had Fidonet and Fidonet points 20 years ago. Usenet was not as prevalent as you make out I'm afraid. It may have been prevalent in university campuses and the like, but not in mainstream joe publics arena.
What a ridiculous statement to make! Of course a web forum can scale that far, and well beyond. A well managed and well implemented web site can handle thousands of visitors concurrently no problem at all, microsoft.com does that all day every day - I'm not convinced that a news server can handle that many concurrent connections (I'm not saying it can't). But this isn't comparing apples with oranges.
I'm not sure why you are so hung up about usenet being better than online forums. I'm not - I recognise that each has a place, and each has advantages and disadvantages. Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that.
I think it would be better to get back on topic for this forum, rather than continue the my-dads-bigger-than-you-dad schoolyard discussion.
PoP
Yes, I agree totally. One of the fundamental flaws with web forums is that they send the entire user interface over the network rather than just the message text. Unless someone changes the currently-recognised laws of physics, web forums will *always* be slower to navigate than a properly set-up usenet configuration. And you will always be limited to whatever user interface(s) the provider of the forum forces on you.
They also don't permit you to readily store and index articles locally for searching and archival (unlike usenet). And as a general rule, web forums don't allow you to do any killfiling or scoring of articles which, in a busy group like uk.d-i-y, is very important IMHO.
The only advantage to them is that some people who don't know much about computers or the Internet (but may be knowledgable on other topics) sometimes use them. As a general rule though, I find them more hassle than they're worth (even with a nice high-speed, low-latency Internet connection), regardless of the fact that some of them might offer potentially useful information.
Still, I applaud ScrewFix for setting up their forums. If nothing else, it will help to keep the riff-raff out of here!
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