Noticed this about our web based forums today:
the “Re: What is this? “Can’t find record in ”’ on query.”" post on the cluster forum from 10/02/06 07:53:20 isn’t the last message in that thread. there are currently 6 messages of which I only see 2.
Not only that, but from looking at the RSS, I can’t even see this post.
argh! So I shot off an email to our internal guys. The reply was that they don’t have hacking Phorum on their radar (fair enough). Of course, this just means that Phorum sucks[1] (or at least did in the version we do) and adds to the list of reasons why web based forums are much like doing $adjective to $noun.
What is it with new internet lamers and the inability to use an email program? Or even an nntp client (okay, usenet is officially crap now unless you just want spam and pornography) but the tradition of companies having internal/external nntp servers is old, tried and true.
[1] Phorum may itself be a great web based forum. It’s just that all web based forums suck – on principle.
i actually wrote the rss/atom support for our forum.
i’m not sure which message you’re talking about, but the rss and atom feeds for that thread contain all seven posts. the posts won’t be in the rss/atom feeds for that specific forum because there are more new posts since then.
our mailing lists do have an nntp server, but we’ve never set one up for the forums.
I agree with you. I have never understood the appeal of forums. I’d much rather just poll my email, than having to visit the same thread over and over again to see if there is a relevant reply.
What I am curious about is why hasn’t there been much innovation in forums in the past years? With blogs we see all sort of tools springing up, but forums are the same UBB design with the same similar functionality for the past 5 years.
Oh well… What can ya do?
Hey, some of us just prefer forums, even as we use NNTP and mailing lists when needed. I find FUDforum to be a fine app with excellent RSS, but when I suggested it someone decided it was better to add what we needed to phorum than to strip what we didn’t need from the more feature-rich FUDforum (and maybe it was).
jim – i presume there’s some sort of setting for how far back the RSS goes? Maybe we just need to get our web guys to tweak that.
Seeing as there’s already logic to know what posts you have and haven’t read (that red ‘new’ tag) it shouldn’t be that hard to export all the new posts via RSS would it?
Currently, compared to getting every post as an email, it’s buggy as I can miss things.
Don’t feel bad though – the fact that there’s RSS at all means I actually look at the forums. Without the RSS feed I wouldn’t look at anything. so kudos for writing the code dude!
I don’t understand why people say Usenet is full of spam and porn – sure Google Groups is, but any decent nntp server admin will be running nocem or whatever, and I never see any spam in the groups I read on UWA’s news server.
funky… maybe I’ll go back and have a look at usenet again…..
maybe…
most recent thing I was using nntp for was internal lists at sgi.