CODEWITHSUNDEEP
nntpusenet
Jason
Jason

Reputation: 17099

Is NNTP dead / NNTP successor?

If its dead, is there a successor?

For those who didn't know:

The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles (aka netnews), as well as transferring news among news servers.

Upvotes: 15

Views: 8554

Answers (9)

wtfxyz
wtfxyz

Reputation: 11

The only true NNTP Replacement could be Mailing lists. Not any web-based forum.

Upvotes: 0

Nicolás
Nicolás

Reputation: 7533

I have never been on Usenet. But I use several “private” NNTP servers (disconnected from Usenet), including the awesome NNTP interface to mailing lists: http://gmane.org/

Edit: oh and none of those servers I use needs an "account". Yet they're quite spam-free.

Upvotes: 6

Bryan Oakley
Bryan Oakley

Reputation: 386335

I know many people like myself who still use nntp / usenet on a daily basis. It is an absolutely invaluable tool. I doubt it will go away anytime soon.

It's like the pinball machine of online communities. All the new kids may not know what it's all about and may think it is dead, but it is still alive and kicking and there's still nothing that can compare.

Upvotes: 3

Chui Tey
Chui Tey

Reputation: 5574

Agreed, NNTP's time is past. We have good connectivity; there is no need to replicate data across multiple servers any more. I use Google Groups in preference to NNTP.

However, NNTP does provide some community assurance against catastrophic failure. There's probably an open-source project in there somewhere for web-based forums to provide this kind of distributed, fault-tolerant, load-balanced services.

Upvotes: 1

fwzgekg
fwzgekg

Reputation: 321

It's nowhere near as relevant as it once was. Nowadays any popular forum is going to be web-based. For example, stackoverflow would be very crap if based around NNTP. You just can't provide the same experience when your interaction with the forum software is so limited.

Another big problem is that you can't display a CAPTCHA over NNTP, or indeed provide any other modern interactive anti-spam measure.

I'd say yes, it's practically dead.

Upvotes: 1

Davide
Davide

Reputation: 17828

It's not dead (yet?) but it's being replaced by feeds and feedreader (RSS and Atom)

Upvotes: 2

Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet

Reputation: 1503090

It's not dead - there's still plenty of traffic in the public C# group, for instance.

StackOverflow is becoming a pseudo-successor - but only for some kinds of threads. Q&A threads are ideally suited to SO; discussion threads don't work nearly as well here as they do in newsgroups.

Upvotes: 8

Black
Black

Reputation: 5080

It is not dead, but still used by guys who do prefer plain-text over animated emoticons and flashy ad-banners.

Seriously, I have been using it since ten years and I cannot detect any drop in the number of articles or users.

Upvotes: 9

Andru Luvisi
Andru Luvisi

Reputation: 25338

NNTP isn't dead. It just smells funny.

Sadly, these days if you want to follow 10 different forums then you need to have 10 different accounts and learn 10 different UIs. I like being able to pick the newsreader that I like and have the same interface for all of my newsgroups. OpenID may bring some of this back, but I'm afraid that the "new internet" just doesn't care about interoperability like the "old internet" did.

Upvotes: 28

Related Questions