newbie.john wrote on Thu, 21 January 2010 16:09

How many days have you got to read my answer ? Newsgroups (if they are private/moderated) are far superior to ANY web forum. Not just FUD. For a start, in a news post it is absurdly easy to intersperse comments in a previous post. As is so well illustrated by this post it is almost impossible to do that easily in a web forum post. Unless someone is well versed in HTML and/or programming.

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Really? I just hit "quote" right now instead of "reply", which gave me everything you posted as text. To answer each phrase, I select it and hit the button marked "quote" to display it as you see. I type my reply; I select the next phrase; I hit "quote" again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Okay, that sounds good. I selected your paragraph, and did as you said. Let's see if it looks a mess or not.

Having looked at this in "Preview" it is as I suspected. Better, but still a mess. It is hard to work out which "Quote" is yours and which "Quote" is mine. Once one get's past "immediate" quoting a web forum is terrible.

A newsgroup post however would NOT generally have problems with multiple quoting levels. Indents clearly suggest "who said what". Also, newsreaders can often be setup to show different quoting levels as different colours.

Of course this could be fixed in a web forum BUT I certainly haven't seen it addressed by anyone. The "Quote" button would need additions. Eg.

(1) Insert "quote" tags and name of previous poster.
(2) Insert "quote" tags and name of poster before previous poster.
(3) Insert "quote" tags and name of poster before ... etc.

Of course that would be too wordy so something like..

(1) Insert "quote" tags and name of previous poster.
(2) Insert "quote" tags and name of poster [ ] levels prior.

Might be better than what we have here or the above suggestion.

< snip >

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Also, if this were a newsgroup and I wanted to download all of the posts then that would be absurdly easy in a newsreader. Downloading thousands of posts in a newsreader would only take me a matter of minutes.(Can I do that with FUD messages ? I doubt it.)

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I've never tried - Frank? Can it do this?

As an example, I just visited a newsgroup I hadn't known about before. It had over 9,000 posts in it. My newsreader downloaded them all in 16 minutes.

I am pretty certain I could * NOT * download all the messages in the FUD forums to my computer. Which hugely increases the possibility of repeating questions that have been asked before but aren't in a FAQ.

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Also, I can easily make a newsreader "view" for such things as "unread messages" or "last 3 days" etc. etc.

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You noticed the clickable text in the header above which is marked "Unread Messages", "Unanswered Messages" and "Today's Posts", right?

Sure, but what if I only want "Unread Messages" for the last 3 days ? Or "Unread Messages" for November ?

Or "Unanswered Messages" from January only ? Or "Unanswered Messages" from November ?

Or "Today's Posts" excluding poster "Fred", "Mary" and "Jane" ? Or "Today's Posts" for "Harry" only ?

I can do all that in a newsreader, and a lot more.

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So archiving/posting/searching etc. are all very very much easier in a newsreader.

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I'm here because the NNTP server I used didn't do it for me. YMMV but I found archiving in a forum format far more convenient. < snip >

Well, I have no idea what you mean by "archiving in a forum format". Isn't the FUD forum server where posts are archived ? How can you archive the posts on your computer ?

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Lastly, I have one more question regarding the above. If Tom, Dick and Harry posted in a FUD forum that mirrored to an NNTP server then would their posting info be different names eg. Tom, Dick or harry ? Or would all the different posts be a single address eg. "From FUD forum" ?

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The posts will show up on the NNTP server with the user name and address they have at the forum

.

Thank you.