Re: Read certain forums with Gnus (Canopus)

[Jonas Steverud <tvrud@bredband.net>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> The setup in these forums and others I've browsed, is so clunky since
> it is web based, that it makes doing serious reading very time
> consuming.  Something like saving snippets of info isn't even
> practicle since it is so cumbersome to do.

<rant>In my not very humble opinion are the web based forums a step
ten to fifteen year back in time. The functionality of them are so
limited that the sheer frustration of even following the most
interesting thread is so overwhelming that I have to have a lie down
and curse the developers ancestors down to and beyond the Stone
Age. No threading (a "thread" is the same as a "all articles with the
same subject sorted in chronological order"). Either all articles are
marked as read when you log off or you have to "read" a "thread" to
mark it read - there is no "mark this as read" which makes it very
hard to follow interesting discussions. And so on. I don't think
USENET was this bad even in the beginning.</rant>

> Even if it involved using something like wget to grab it all first, it
> might be worth doing if gnus could be brought to bear somehow.

I think it is possible using W3 and the nnweb interface - I have not
looked into neither but the forums are web based and not very
obfuscated. The problem is that the design of the forum differ from
place to place so if there are three forums forum.x.com,
www.y.com/forums and foobar.z.com/chat, there is a risk we need to
make nnforumsX, nnforumsY, and nnforumsZ. Even of all use UBBTHreads
or phpthread (or whatever the other larger project is called).

The lack of proper threads makes it hard as well - we probably need to
make some cleaver trick to give each article an article number.

But I heart fully agree, a backend for Gnus for this would be a gift
from the gods. I don't know how much I could help since I got to many
hobbies and projects myself already - but all papers are in due order,
so it would be possible for me to lend a hand.

On possibility would be to work with the forum system developers to
actually have a "Gnus plugin" - i.e. have a plain version of the
threads as well, maybe even a XML file. That way other programs might
be developed to interface the forum systems. E.g. if forum.x.com/ is a
forum system with a number of "subgroups" a, b, c and d
(forum.x.com/a, forum.x.com/b, ...) then one can access this bare bone
human-in-readable file by replacing forum.x.com/a/index.html with
forum.x.com/a/threadindex.xml and then forum.x.com/a/threads.xml or
forum.x.com/a/someinterestingthread.xml . Those XML files will be
something similar to what is pulled from NNTP but formatted in XML. (I
think it will be easier to persuade the maintainers to format it in
XML then to format in - say - "NNTP", if you catch my drift.)

Just a thought from the top of my head.

I think it is time to end this mail before it gets out of hand. :-)

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