NetNewsWire Moves to Discourse

I think this will increase the longevity and accessibility of the information going forward.

Accessibility is questionable. "Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum browser requirements are high."

@vintner I find that frustrating as well. At least there’s now a hidden way to read Discourse without JavaScript. Presumably, the Internet Archive will scrape it now. In any case, Slack was much worse and required logging in.

One of the problem with Slack is that its archive only goes back so far unless you’re paying for it (and I wasn’t).

Slack pricing appears to be over $5 per user per month (as far as I can tell), and the group had hundreds of users, and so there’s no way that paying for it was an option.

I did save a copy of the NetNewsWire archive, but it includes nothing older than February 2024, which means the first five or six years are just lost.

(I’m not going to publish that archive, because everyone posting there had the expectation of the semi-privacy and ephemerality that Slack provides.)

It's a hideous, bloated monstrosity (client *and* server side) but at least it's not Slack (!!!???) and it still has "Mailing List Mode", which allows you to read and reply to threads so long as you quote using BBCode/MD, and you can only start new threads if you have the correct list address for a forum, which may or may not actually be configured.

And the ten years are almost up.

@Brent Yeah, I agree that the archive should remain private.

@Sebby Which forum would you recommend?

@Michael Beats me. Unfortunately, perhaps more owing to its mailing list mode than in spite of it, it does seem to "fit the bill" pretty well, in most cases.

I suppose there's Mailman 3 or Sympa, if you want to start from a more mailing-list-first approach. But of course I can appreciate that increasingly that's just not the usual model for most newbies (still very big in the blindness community and for technical committees). Pretending that a mailing list is a forum is appreciably nicer for the users of the mailing list, though. Groups.io is a hosted service that exemplifies this approach very well, but it has stupid free plan limits and can't be hosted oneself.

@Sebby Yeah, despite ranting about it myself here, my conclusion after running Discourse for my own site (having previously used Mailman and vBulletin for many years) is that it’s distasteful at a technical level but in practice solves lots of different problems rather well. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious alternative that does things the way I’d want.

Has anyone made anything better than phpBB? Serious question. As far as I know, it's still the gold standard of forums, because I haven't really encountered any forums software that works better.

I agree on really disliking Discourse. Every time I go to a forums running it, I get irritated by how hard it is to find what I want and read through threads.

@Bri The core reading interface with phpBB is fine, but IIRC it doesn’t support friendly URLs and has lots of composition limitations (Markdown, images, WYSIWYG) compared with Discourse. There are plug-ins to do various things that should really be part of the core and then they break and get abandoned.

FMM the worst thing about Discourse is the "infinite scroll" behaviour that makes it all janky when you're trying to quickly find your position or just read the entire page without the network. If you could turn that off, and maybe inline all the JS (and/or make a JS-free experience available when failing over due to bad network/content-blocking/JS disabled) then I could probably love Discourse a bit more. But it shatters the dream of the semantic web and IMO is a pretty shitty standard-bearer for online discourse.

Technical people now have "public inbox", which is God's answer. But there's no use pretending anyone but nerds want that.

Xenforo is an excellent modernized take on the classic web forum experience, imo.

Critically, it's the underlying software that's modernized, not the well-proven concept of how an internet discussion forum should work.

@Michael > At least there’s now a hidden way to read Discourse without JavaScript.

It is the interface presented if accessing Discourse from a soon to be unsupported browser as Safari 15.