It would be nice to have a category in the forum synchronizing with Usenet’s comp.lang.ada.
I found it should be possible using this gateway: GitHub - sman591/discourse-nntp-bridge: Discourse plugin to keep NNTP & Discourse in sync
Unfortunately, currently not in a known deployment: Still supported? · Issue #33 · sman591/discourse-nntp-bridge · GitHub
Running a spam filter would be indispensable.
Or maybe the forum can integrate (I guess read-only) with the Atom feed or the public-inbox from this: public-inbox mirroring instructions ?
Would it be able to keep the spam out? I ask because its nice to have this medium to ask questions from work, but that gets complicated with certain types of spam. I’m all for it if it does keep out the spam as well.
Replicating those posts here will require some development work, expose the forum to more spam, and make it difficult to use certain features: editing posts, polls, image embedding, source code formatting, etc.
How many people are active on comp.lang.ada? Maybe a dozen? At least half of those already have accounts on the forum.
I don’t think the benefits of Usenet integration outweigh the downsides.
Note that recently Google Groups started announcing that on 15 February 2024 they will stop supporting Usenet newsgroups, ie posting from Google Groups will no longer be possible, nor reading new postings from Usenet, only searching “old” content will remain available.
While this might look negative at first sight, it will most probably reduce the amount of spam in newsgroups tremendously, as the bulk is currently posted via Google Groups…
comp.lang.ada is heavily spammed with NSFW content. It made me feel very uncomfortable, which is a major reason why I pushed to set up a separate forum. This place should be kept safe to browse if someone is at work.
I’ve heard there is sometimes good content on it, if you’re looking for a convenient way to read comp.lang.ada, Ada planet is a good aggregator and also includes this forum, reddit, and stack overflow.
The spam on Usenet was generated mainly from Google groups, and generally, only visible from the same interface. I don’t see any spam when using the NNTP interface through Eternal September, and the same on the archive maintained by Jeremy Grosser, so I guess running a spam filter is just effective. Google groups must have set none. This is why I proposed that bridge, but I understand if it is discarded when it would require much work or costs to the forum owner.
I see I’m a bit late to the party here, but I’d like the other way around.
I much prefer Thunderbird + eternal.septempber to any web-forum.
(That probably indicates my age)
To me, it would be really nice to reach forum.ada-lang.io from NNTP
/Björn
A guide to using thunderbird with eternal-september perhaps on ada-lang.io or this forum might be a good replacement for the ease of read access that google groups provided. With a link to an archive too.
Perhaps it could also mention adding ada rss feeds like adacores blog?
The android client that I use is PhoNews. It could format the text line lengths better but it works.
I use Thunderbird, but I didn’t know about eternal-september. Thanks for mentioning it!
I found Getting Started with Usenet - Usenet Big-8 Management Board really useful to this end.
Usenet archives for comp.lang.ada are now accessible on the banner of ada-lang.io, courtesy of @JeremyGrosser