Re: NewsGroups vs vBulletin forum

Don Schoeman wrote:

Just like there are crappy news readers, you get your crappy forum
engines running on crappy webservers.

Perfectly true, but the scales, so far, seem to be very different - the
*worst* nntp reader I've ever used still beats the pants of the best web
interface I've yet seen.

Everything which consumes your bandwidth and speed can be switched
off, including signatures, images, avatars, etc. A well setup
vBulletin based site also uses CSS almost exclusively instead of
graphics. It makes on hell of a difference in speed.

Still not in the same league. While I'm reading the first messages, my good
old nntp reader (OE in my case) is busy in the background downloading more
messages, so as I browse through them, they are already on my computer, not
a web link away. Now with some smart and judicious use of AJAX, you might be
able to do similar read-ahead, though I personally think a web-services
backend has more potential for genuinely good performance and greatest
flexibility at the client end.

I also don't have to go to a different application or web site to read and
manage my email.

They now also include spell checkers.

WOW! Such an innovation!

Besides that, I'm not saying that newsgroups should be removed, but I
personally believe that if CodeGear uses a proper forum engine, and a
community starts building on it, it will probably eventually take
over from newsgroups.

If it's really so good, I would have no objection to that. But it is a
*high* hurdle and I'm not holding my breath.

Every other popular development tool/language
has more than one successfull forum system going, surely they can't
all be just ignorent forumites? I also think that CodeGear would
present itself better to potential new members/customers.

It depends on the kind of company and, most importantly, the kind of
customers involved.

Google: NNTP OR newsgroups (about 46,700,000 results)

<chuckle> You need to do a little more serious research before posting such
ridiculous numbers. Here's a few random search results in google advanced
groups search:

Canada: 6,760,000 hits
Delphi: 4,420,000 hits
Dell: 7,300,000 hits
New York: 6,380,000 hits
Ford: 4,850,000

Oh, here's a good one - '.Net': 21,100,000 hits.

That puts us up to 51 million in just 6 searchs (there might be some overlap
between .Net and Delphi). What percentage of total nntp posts archived by
google do you think this might represent?

--
Wayne Niddery - Winwright, Inc (www.winwright.ca)
"Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others
as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse
pulling the wagon." - Winston Churchill


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