[Asterisk-Users] asterisk newsgrup proposal or phpBB forum

[Joe Greco]

> Not everyone has decent access to NNTP either due to firewalls coporate
> or otherwise 

That's why many news servers allow access on alternate ports.  :-)

> or are under a quota due to the amount of illegal activity
> that appears there. Add to it the inability to control spam or kick an
> unruley users if the need arises. NNTP doesn't solve any problems, and
> phpBB creates a bunch.
> 
> Better question is why do you feel there needs to be a change?

You've missed some "best of breed" options.

A newsgroup by itself may or may not be useful.  However, either way, 
USENET (which isn't entirely limited to NNTP, incidentally) has a bunch of
powerful clients that are designed from the ground up for participating in
large threaded discussions.  This is a major failing of many mail clients.
I find it easier to follow large discussions with the text-based trn 
newsreader than with any graphical mail client I've seen to date - bar 
none - and trn is old technology.  Just the thread tree view itself is so
useful, not to mention one-key cruising through the tree nodes.

Many sites gateway various mailing lists into local hierarchies, for the
explicit purpose of solving some of the problems that "NNTP doesn't solve",
because the medium was designed to deal with the functional equivalent of
mailing list traffic from day one.

You can avoid some of the problems of public newsgroups by making it a one-
way gateway, with moderator pointing back at the original list, therefore
subject to all the normal list posting controls.

Setting up a one-way gateway isn't too difficult.  Is there interest?  I
can certainly start one.  We already do all the FreeBSD lists and a bunch
of other stuff here.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.