[gopher] Future of this list, etc.

[Nuno Silva]

On 2017-10-01 07:56 -0500, Jeff Greer wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 7:03 AM, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva at ist.utl.pt> wrote:
> 
> > On 2017-10-01 12:24 +0100, Matt Owen (Jaruzel) wrote:
> > >
> > > Wrapping a basic web-forum and mailing list system around a single
> > > public USEnet/NNTP group would be a fairly trivial exercise - I am happy
> > > to explore this, if we feel that it's worth looking into?
> >
> > I'd avoid making a web-forum interface unless you have a good way to
> > handle the "conversions" between e-mail "formatting and markup" and the
> > web-forum interface way of doing things. (I guess a good one is to do
> > nothing, and allow only fixed width plain text in the web interface!)
> >
> > With e-mail and news, we already have the clash between
> > bottom/interleaved posting style and Microsoft Outlook's corporate reply
> > and quoting style, and mixes thereof. I'm afraid bringing a web
> > interface with its own style into the mix would complicate matters.
> >
> > Other than this concern, perhaps a web interface would be a bit
> > overkill. But that's also my opinion about this whole idea of "moving
> > the list" to a newsgroup.
> >
> 
> Just throwing this out there. I used to frequent usenet. It is not what it
> used to be.

One thing is USENET, the other is newsgroups and related protocols,
interfaces and clients. Other news server which uses the same interface but
is not syndicating USENET is news.gmane.org, for example.

(IIRC Netscape also used to have their own news server for user
discussion and support. Mozilla has some groups now, which are
syndicated to the USENET server I use, but I believe those are not part
of USENET, and there is some Mozilla server which only carries those
newsgroups.)

And even inside USENET, things are easily different across different
newsgroups. I've been following comp.infosystems.gopher: it's quite
low-traffic and does not seem to be plagued with junk posts. I just
pulled the last few posts from the newsgroup and they all appear to be
on-topic, which is really not comparable to some other USENET groups.

-- 
Nuno Silva