[Gllug] GLLUG Newsletter - 19/06/06

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Russell Howe wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 12:39:30PM +0100, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> > I'm surprised more people do not run news servers (private ones,
> > not connected to Usenet) for this purpose.  They offer most of the
> > advantages of both e-mail and web forums while avoiding most of
> > the disadvantages.  My old ISP used them for a long time and it
> > worked very well.
> 
> To follow up to an old post..
> 
> It should be possible for a news server to be presented in a forum
> style (i.e. using an NNTP server as the backend for a forum instead
> of some custom database), with a full forum interface.
> 
> I don't think I've ever seen such a beast, though..

The BBC's forum system used innd at the back, with some in-house perl
as a thread daemon and mod_perl system interfacing that to provide
public access.  While I was there we'd also looked for such a beast
and not found anything like it even though it seemed like the obvious
solution.  The system it replaced was perl with oracle which Doug
Winter knows all about ;)  This was a replacement for WebX which was
just plain commercial carp.

I used tin to read some of the posts, but each reply was a new post,
people didn't or basically couldn't easily reply in-line via the web
interface, so it wasn't really any more readable in a Usenet client
than via the website.

This system lacked the hardware thrown at a competing system from the
Windows teams, so the new system is Windows based (it had an order of
magnitude more cpu and ram, but was receiving half the traffic.  It's
not a surprise it won, but it did help that the Windows lovers
threatened to resign of we'd kept with the UNIX system).

It's not impossible that the BBC could be convinced to release the
code, known as Howerd2 to keep in the spirit of all things open:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/

It's essentially now abandonwere.

Damion

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Damion Yates - damion.yates at gmail.com
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