Benefit of Forums over Newsgroups?

peterlairo · Post by **peterlairo** » November 5th, 2002, 6:59 am

Perhaps I'm overlooking something obvious, but what is the benefit of having discussions here rather than in a MZ Newsgroup.

The only thing I can think of off hand is that some users don't know how to set up a NG account. But for the people participating in MZ, that should not even remotely be an issue. :-\

I think NGs are much better because NG-readers (Mozilla-Mail&News) tend to be much more flexible and better reflect the usage habits of its user.

tmb · Post by **tmb** » November 5th, 2002, 3:12 pm

what would be optimal would be a forum that was linked to a newsgroup so that people that hate newsgroups-like me- could use the forum and people that love newsgroups (peterlairo) could use NG-readers but both of us could read each others messages

johann_p · Post by **johann_p** » November 6th, 2002, 4:03 am

The obvious advantages of newsgroups are of course: threaded posts - i miss the thrading of
the old forums, and a much better way to find out which messages you already have read and
which are new. This would probably also be possible with better web-forum software.
The advantage of any web forum is that it nicely fits in the Mozillazine site and does not need
any action of users except registering. And it is under complete control of the site owners
so it is easy to rename, add new forums, handle users, no spam messages etc.
I trust that the site owners did an informed choice of the software
- there is probably forum software out
there that is more news-like but maybe it has other problems or is not free.

weave · Post by **weave** » November 6th, 2002, 5:53 pm

tmb wrote:what would be optimal would be a forum that was linked to a newsgroup so that people that hate newsgroups-like me- could use the forum and people that love newsgroups (peterlairo) could use NG-readers but both of us could read each others messages

I always wondered why web boards aren't gatewayed into newsgroups too. I went so far as to hack together a perl cgi script that used News::NNTPClient to present a newsgroup in a (very) simple web interface for a user where I work. An example is at <a href="http://news.dtcc.edu/cgi-bin/newstree?group=user.berlin.perry-mason">my work site</a> and uses an internal (non-propogated) newsgroup on our news server called user.berlin.perry-mason and uses the xref header to build the thread tree.

Not that this is going to solve the curiosity here -- I'm just basically chiming in that I too wonder why things like slash, pbpBB, etc, don't gateway into a newsgroup...

MXN · Post by **MXN** » November 6th, 2002, 6:05 pm

About the poll on this thread: Does the choice "Forum" also include Phorum forums, like the old one here at MozillaZine? I liked that format much more, because it had threading. Although the ability to edit posts at this bulletin board is nice - handy for those embarrassing typos.

Stefan · Post by **Stefan** » November 6th, 2002, 6:57 pm

The main reason I'm glad we now have phpBB instead of old phorum is that here, if someone replies to a thread it goes to the top...

Looking trough 10-15 pages on phorum just to see if someone answered your post in a thread started 2 weeks ago got VERY tedious...

Too bad we couldn't have both intelligent sorting and threaded view at the same time though

Post by **kerz** » November 6th, 2002, 8:29 pm

Go use news.mozilla.org if you want newsgroups. This is a website, not a newsserver.

Thread closed, move along.

Benefit of Forums over Newsgroups?

Which would you prefer for MozillZine discussions?

Benefit of Forums over Newsgroups?

The obvious advantages of newsgroups

Poll