Post by BillThey should have made the xbox forums use a news group back end. Web
based forums are slow and hard to navigate. It also sucks having to
remember every username/password for every forum you use on the
internet. I visit about 15 different web based forums on occasion
and normally have to register a new account everytime because I can't
remember the orginal user name or password.
Just as an old timer aside, whenever I've dealt with any type of community,
there's almost always been two types of people. When I started on the
Internet, there were the IRC'ers and the MUDders. There was always some
overlap, but you would generally find people didn't use both.
Its the same with web based forums and newsgroups. There are those who
prefer one, and those who prefer the other, and a slim slice of those who
don't prefer either.
From an administrator point of view, I would almost certainly prefer web
based forums because it would give me far greater control, such as the
ability to edit posts for content (so rather than blocking posts for
obscenities, one could mask them,) the ability to move posts from one forum
to another, the ability to create and delete forums without worrying about
little islands of the Internet that don't agree to accept your create/delete
messages, far less spam, and I'm sure I could come up with a few other
reasons.
As a user, I almost don't care. I want to go where the information is. But
I'm a lurker, so I don't necessarily have to worry about user names and
passwords. Also, that's me personally. I understand why some users prefer
web boards, I understand why some prefer newsgroups. I've been out in Usenet
for some 13 years now
Of course, there are administrative reasons to prefer newsgroups too. NNTP
is an established standard (well, ok, its an RFC) and has a wide variety of
clients so, in addition to writing 'my' own web based reader, my users can
use any number of nntp clients they are comfortable with. Being part of
Usenet, users don't have to load down my server to pull posts, they can get
them from most anywhere, assuming the admins accept the newgroup messages.
In addition to the disclaimer below, let me point out that these statements
do not reflect Microsoft's plans or policies in general, or any Microsoft
business group in particular. I just felt like giving some history and
opinion.
John Eddy
Microsoft Newsgroups Administrator
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.