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What are the reasons that nntp access was discontinued?
As a direct result a lot of long-time, knowledgable users seem to have abandoned the forums especially on the Macromedia side - nntp was just so much quicker let alone the possibilities to filter and quickly save topics as plain text. This is more than a bit disappointing.
Please, consider bringing back nttp access.
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I'm not in on Adobe's reasoning, but I assume a factor is that once something gets into NNTP it becomes public domain (in practise, if not legally) and anyone can access it and repackage the material. I think they want to keep it on the web because this format makes it much more difficult to harvest the material. I know that many (most??) of the forum hosts used NNTP, so I am sure there was a strong push in the planning period for NNTP to be maintained. It apparently failed.
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Yesterdays thread on this topic:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/414965?tstart=30
I do not find the public domain argument to be very satisfying. I think if some bean counter thinks the purpose of these forums is to build some body of content that can be packaged and controlled, then that person is very narrow minded.
The purpose of these forums has always been for US - the user community to share and support each other. This saves Adobe money by providing a place where people can get answers to basic to moderately complex problems without having to use expensive human resources paid for by Adobe. It also builds the good will of Adobe products in that there is a place where somebody can go and get problems solved, often quickly and easily, before they become a festering sore in a developers mind that motivates them to look for a different software solution for their tasks.
NNTP allowed a lot of very knowledgable people to be very helpful when they had a few spare moment in thier day. They could quickly scan their news reader inbox for new topics that they can help. Then they could quickly fire off a reply within the reader and move on to the next message. All this without having to wait for a browser to render a lot of JavaScript and DHTML over and over again for each and every message and reply.
The email system could be a lesser substitue for this functionality if it worked correctly. But, to date, my experience with it has been less then encouraging. The mesages are comming in all jumbled up, the subects have these long, unimportant strings "[ColdFusion and Flash Integrations] New message:" prepended to them so that I can not easily tell what they are. The emails do not properly follow the email RFC standard so that my email reader can properly thread the messages, thus I can not easily follow in topics in any given forum. I just get a random quote that is meainingless without context and the only way to get that context seems to be to fire up a browser. Replying to them is problematic where I have seen my and other users messages completely dissapear when processed by this system, resulting in a blank box for a reply.
I was a long time NNTP user that enjoyed helping my fellow ColdFusion developers on these forums whenever I had a few free moments in my day. But I do not forsee myself sticking it out for very long in this new forum if there is not some improvment, or at least some communication or acknowlegement of some hope for improvement, from the powers that be. All we seem to get is that there is no NNTP, there are no plans for NNTP, the email does not work as expected, but there is no acknowlegement of what, if anything, is going to be done about that either.
I know that I am not alone in this manner. I know that those that are most vocal about this issue where some of the most knowlegable and frequently helpful people of the previous forums and I just can not imagine how the quality of this resource is going to be improved by their loss, no matter how subjectivily pretty the new web interface is juged to be.
I give myself another day or two to see if I can somehow make this work, then I will move on and check back in a few months to a year to see if anything has improved.
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A lot of people have also suggested developing an AIR app to mimic NNTP for people. John recently set up a forum where folks can gather that are interested in following along with that, tho last time I checked, the forum still needs someone to kick-start it. It's at http://forums.adobe.com/community/air/forum_project
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DorothyK@Adobe wrote:
A lot of people have also suggested developing an AIR app to mimic NNTP for people.Forum Project
With all due respect I don't see the point in recreating something, that's simple by design and readily available, in a proprietary technology. It just adds a whole layer of complexity.
To wit: just before, when I hit "Reply" here, the interface took a long time to load and finally crashed my browser FF 3. I don't recall that ever happening in my newsreader. If I have to wait and hold my breath every time posting here then I feel my time is wasted. Of course only those that have actually ever used a newsreader for some time, will be able to understand the issue.
I totally agree with what Ian said.
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With all due respect I don't see the point in recreating something, that's simple by design and readily available, in a proprietary technology. It just adds a whole layer of complexity.
Reading in between the lines before the change over I got the impression that they blame the NNTP access for a lot of the problems of the Web-x forums, and their last attepts to combine web and NNTP was a disiaster. I don't imagine that they would be eager to repeat that.
This is all just conjecture on my part.
Jay
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I too want to express that I am very sorry not to have the nntp access any longer.
I really hope we will be given that possibility again soon.
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Ah, but with the nntp you couldn't see all the pretty product ads when you logged out.
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I totally agree !
The front end sucks.
It is slow to load.
Hard to search and requires me to load a web page and logon just to view new posts.
Nobody said that the Adobe has to have a usenet feed. It was unilateral anyway.
There are *many* companies that have privite NNTP servers with no Usenet feed.
Hell, this interface is SO exploitable. Why even have HTML ? Just pure text would be fine.
Bring back NNTP access !!
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DHLipman wrote:
Bring back NNTP access !!
I couldn't put it any better.
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Shouting nnever helps.
Don
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DonRicklin wrote:
Shouting never helps.
Don
LOL!
Jay
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DonRicklin wrote:
Shouting never helps.
Don
Especially when we were told that with this forum software it is physically impossible.
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Who said that?
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jochemd wrote:
Who said that?
It was stated in various way during the period when we were familiarising ourselves with the Jive software.
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But by whom? Adobe officials? Jive officials?
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jochemd wrote:
But by whom? Adobe officials? Jive officials?
Don't ask me, I don't look at those silly badges!
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NNTP was built into the WebX software, it is not here. It is possible to set it up here, but would be a major PIA to administer (not John's words, but the intent of them). There has been an official decision made that it's not going to be supported in these forums. If people want similar access, they are going to need to find other routes to it. Air was suggested as a possibility. Earlier I gave the URL to the forum that John set up for folks that are interested in being part of the solution rather then just grumbling about the problem. Other solutions also welcome.
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If people want similar access, they are going to need to find other routes to it
as long as adobe understands that those routes probably won't begin with www.adobeforums.com...<shrug>
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DorothyK@Adobe wrote:
NNTP was built into the WebX software, it is not here.
According to this post in another NNTP thread [NO NNTP News Feed = A loss of a lot of helpful people] it is part of the Jive software.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1874943#1874943
http://www.jivesoftware.com/builds/docs/clearspace/latest/ClearspaceAdminGuide.html#SynchronizingContentwithEmailorNewsgroups
It may still be a PIA, but I would presume so is alienating almost 15% of your content providers so that they leave.
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i just find it amazing that just as some major players are finally starting to understand that you give the customer what they want and they'll beat a path to your door, adobe seems hell bent on going in the other direction on so many issues. sad sad sad.
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I have spent most of my internet life inside my NNTP client, either getting help or giving help, for numerous software manufacturers. I organize my stuff a particular way. I capture threads and save them locally for my own reference. But I cannot stomach web-based discussion interfaces at all!!! I do not want technical support mixed in with my email. And I do not want to dink around with pressing the Next Page button, trying to find my thread! What "genious" thought it would be a good idea to lose NNTP? Adobe, you're killing me!
Bryan Elwood