[gopher] Future of this mailing list

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Héctor A. Abreu <habreu71 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 06:22:42PM +0300, Ciprian Dorin Craciun wrote:
>>
>> Please don't use NNTP...  As -- again an irony -- I guess quite a few
>> subscribers use webmail, Android / iOS native clients, and many other
>> MUA's that don't support NNTP...
>>
>
> Are there technical reasons preventing some members of this list to subscribe to comp.infosystems.gopher ?


Well, the first "non-technical" reason for reading this list via NNTP
I would say is "we are living in 2017", and it seems that email (and
SPAM) have won the war...

And let's face it, the `gopher://` protocol is, I guess for many, a
hobby.  Therefore I don't think making it more complicated to access
its community (i.e. through NNTP) would serve this purpose very
well...




> I access newsgroup comp.infosystems.gopher from my Android phone via ssh with a free app called VX ConnectBot. If you don't have a remote ssh server running a usenet news reader, you can subscribe to sdf.org, which is also free and will allow you to access the usenet even if it's blocked by your ISP.


The second "non-technical" reason is easy to spot if one tries to make
a list of what one has to undertake to read NNTP.  Please note I'm not
saying using NNTP is wrong, as anyone is free to do as he pleases.
I'm just trying to put it from the perspective of a "casual" gopher
user...

So the steps are:

(0)  Although one uses email to access 100% of one's subscribed to
mailing lists, just for Gopher one has to ditch his usual workflow and
switch to something "new".  (Not to mention that in latest Firefox
versions, the `gopher://` protocol is not supported anymore, and we
have to use proxyies...)

(1)  Learn about NNTP.

(2)  Find an NNTP server that relies the mentioned newsgroup.

(3)  Find an NNTP client compatible with ones platform, and one which
is up-to-date with regard to security.  (Any good, lightweight,
candidates?  And hopefully one that has a GUI?  Anything else except
Thunderbird or Evolution which are humongous monsters?)
(3a)  Find a packaged binary for your OS.
(3b)  Learn how to use it.

(4)  Configure everything so that it works.

(5)  Repeat from step (3) with each device one uses.  (Say at least
laptop and phone.)


Now in order to read Gopher related news:

(6)  Open the NNTP client just for this purpose.

(7)  Wait until it fetches the news.  (Unfortunately for Gopher, there
is not too much chatter...)

(8)  Read the "news".

Am I missing something?

Sorry,
Ciprian.