Arkanis A blog about random stuff, but mostly programming.

NNTP forum - a forum like NNTP frontend

programming, nntp, php, jquery

The NNTP forum is a modern frontend to newsgroups. It's not a real forum on its own but rather displays the messages of a newsgroup server like a forum does.

The message list of a topic with the form to post a reply

Here's the short overview:

This is the basic stuff. Right now the forum is optimized for the environment of my university. Therefore the authorization of users is handled in an unusual way:

Ok, now to the technical stuff:

The NNTP forum is up and running at my university since serveral weeks. Unfotunately there is no demo page because you would need an account of my university. You can view some more screen shots on the projects page. If you're interested and want to play with the software just let me know. Leave a comment or drop me a mail. I usually make my projects publically available but the project is optimized for a specific deployment right now. I'm a bit ill from releasing projects without getting any feedback. Therefore I will only take the time to generalize the code base if there is someone who wants it.

Why another NNTP frontend?

My university uses newsgroups to announce official information. These newsgroups can also be used by students to discuss different topics (pretty much everything). Unfortunately the acceptance among the students wasn't very high during the last years. Many students (me included) don't know newsgroups when starting to study. For some people it can be hard to configure the newsgroups in their mail client because our university uses certificates and its own certificate authority. Thanks to that Thunderbird just refuses to accept the news server until you import the certificate authority in a somewhat complicated way. Its a bit disappointing that the result after all that looks just like a bunch of ordinary mails.

People could use the Web-News frontend for the newsgroups as an alternative to a real mail client. However Web-News is not really the most up to date software and the internet changed a little bit since it received its last major update. This doesn't make Web-News a bad NNTP frontend. It's just not perfect for new students that are used to internet forums and facebook. The userbility just isn't as good as it could be for young students.

Because of that not much students checked the newsgroups regulary. Important news are not noticed, lectures are not visited because only a few know they exist… well, I exeggerate quite a bit but this was the direction we were heading towards. These acceptance problems lead to a discussion about the future of newsgroups on our university.

One idea was to replace the newsgroups with a forum. However newsgroups are already a forum. There are some newsgroups (forums) with threads and messages. It's just the presentation in mail clients and Web-News that make newsgroups look “old”. To test that I created a prototype of the NNTP forum within two days. It was read only and did only very simple and inefficient message parsing. But it was already quite intuitive to handle and much more like forums people a used to today.

react

nice meh bad surprised confused agree disagree

Comments

Newsfeed