The more I think about it... NNTP Doesn't Cut It

So I've been posting ideas about how we could best merge NNTP usefulness and feature rich web solutions @ Microsoft.  The 3rd plan I outlined involves cutting ties with NNTP and creating a better offline client that also supports the added features of the ASP.NET 2.0 forums.  I haven't really given much weight to this plan before since it involves the development of both a new client app that people would have to download and a set of web services to be exposed from the ASP.NET 2.0 forums for people to take advantage of the client.  And besides, windows comes with Outlook Express right?

But the more I (My opinion has also been influenced by feedback from Daniel and others internally)think about it adding NNTP to the ASP.NET 2.0 forums is sort of a hack that ignores most of the benefits for moving beyond NNTP in the first place.  People who wanted an offline, cached, experience could would download the client and the rest would probably be happy with the web support.  If the client and the web services are all open source then users would probably also expand this solution over time as well.  And the web services would be public so anyone could writing their own client as well. 

I do worry, however, about ignoring a standard that's been around for a long time and replacing it with a set of web services that would, at first, only work with one client.  Though maybe we can convince OE to support them in Longhorn.  :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2004
  >Though maybe we can convince OE to support them in Longhorn.
  
  Isn't OE end of lifed? I seem to remember reading that on Slashdot.

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2004
  Not everyone wants a web experience and certainly not a web services that would work with one client. First off I think your baseline is incorrect if you are using Outlook Express as the shining NNTP client experience. It's far from it. Go try Agent from Forte or Thunderbird or go grab Newsgator that plugs into outlook with the nntp posting add in.
  
  Outlook Express should not be your benchmark.
  Throw OE out the window and build a newsreader that is worthy of NNTP.

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2004
  <blockquote>Though maybe we can convince OE to support them in Longhorn. :-)</blockquote>
  
  Smile when you say that, stranger... :-)

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2004
  Why not work with the wider community (including Open Source) to extend the NNTP protocol to include all the features you are looking for (moderation, single sign on, etc.)?
  
  Release this as an RFC and everyone's favourite NNTP reader can implement the standard.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  I love the newsgroups. I don't really care about NNTP. What I want is a fast experience, so I can answer as many questions in a timeframe as possible. If the backend is a special MS-only protocol, I don't care.
  
  The other thing is Googling. Google Groups is a huge asset. Whatever MSFT does, they need to ensure that the data is exposed to a good search engine.
  
  Fast client, good search. That's all I care about.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  Personally, I think NNTP is not something I would suggest striving to extend. It, like FTP and HTTP, are old protocols that really trade off huge amounts of functionality for effiency that is unneeded, and they are badly designed because of it. NNTP is a hacky protocol that has been over extended and maltreated to get it into a semi-usable state. However, right now, its the only standard that exists. Sometimes the dead-minded adherance to standards strictly because they are standards is not a good idea. NNTP really doesn't need to exist anymore, IMHO. It will last a long time entirely based on the strength of its existence...not on any particular merit to the protocol.
  

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  [Bah, managed to hit submit before finishing that post. This post can be joined to it if the admin wishes to bother ;)]
  
  Now, the problem is designing a cleaner solution. Some of the really popular solutions we see these days, web services, xml, etc. suffer from the same problems we have in NNTP. HTTP is inherently stateless so NNTP has a leg up there. web services use xml and http, generally, xml has to be escaped and can't contain binary data, so it is pretty equal to the trickiness of mime posts as they exist in NNTP(only upside of xml is schemas and namespaces, which are better than the X-Whatever style mime headers, IMHO).
  
  Other bits you've been talking about, multiple forum reputation, etc would require a new protocol of some sort for communication between servers, be it out of band from NNTP or an inherent feature in the new protocol.
  
  However, if a new protocol is created or if NNTP is just extended, I think Microsoft could do a few things to increase its usage and feasibility:
  1) definatly release an rfc or othersuch standard.
  2) provide a .NET assembly that implements the protocol in full. That would allow both 3rd party sites that use ASP.NET to easily access the backbone as well as allow smart clients to be built easily. This could be open source or not, I doubt it would matter. Ditto for being a part of the framework. Ideally it would work on mono however.
  3) Provide an open source CC++ implementation of atleast the reader portion that is as platform independent as possible. Not only does it show good faith, which is popular these days, it should ease the move for unmanaged readers, including outlook express, agent, what have you. I don't know that a CC++ implementation of the server-server protocol(if its different) is as useful as say, a perl, php, or java one would be, however.
  
  As for google groups, the simplist solution is to expose a read only nntp server that google groups and other search engines could reference(maybe microsoft.readonly.<name>) until such an extended protocol gains enough ground for google to support it. Sites that allow posting would have to adapt to the new protocolextensions.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  I don't understand why we need a new format. This has been said before but, people like accessing and storing the data in different ways. The existing formats and venues provide ample choices for people to do what they want.
  
  I would argue that if you want to build a better and common user experience across the community sites then you should do the following:
  
  Create the two primary venues for exchanging information for all of the sites: NNTP and Forums. I mean, all community sites should offer both so the user has a choice.
  
  or
  
  Use NNTP as the underlying storage mechanism and build forums that interact with the newsgroups. V2 of the forums support this concept and these guys seem to have a nice web based version of the .NET newsgroups. I fial to see what you lose when building online forums from the newsgroups?
  
  Wait, I hear someone in the back saying “But, I can't easily search all of the information in the disparate sites.“. Ok, so build a federated search engine to search the material. I mean, isn't there something similar being done by the VS.NET Community/Help folks already?
  

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  These guys was supposed to be these guys - http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/newsgroups/

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  Susan: I agree that there are better clients for NNTP. But the clients aren't really my problem. My problems are some of the inherent problems that come with NNTP and lack of features that people request with modern web forums. I think it's unfair to say "one client" if the services were a public part of the ASP.NET then anyone could build a good client that takes advantage of the features exposed from the forums.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  Patrick: Just for arguments sake lets pretend we went with a solution that exposed RSS. In ten years you can imagine that google (now starting with personalized searches) will have a RSS search for the developer space that would be even better than the newsgroups search. Just hypothetical. There are searches that could be better. For example: the google groups search returns me posts whether or not they have a credible answer attached with them.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  Ray: Another problem that won't be fixed by extending NNTP is that of firewalls. A lot of users require a solution that doesn't use non-web ports. This is why there are web front ends to newsgroups. One suggestion I heard though was to create an NNTP->Web bridge for client software to use.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  Micheal: "Fast client, good search. That's all I care about. " - good to know. Most users aren't attached to a technology as long as they get the answers they need quickly.
  
  Daniel: Thanks for your additional feedback. I agree that exposing read-only NNTP might be a good solution to google groups. And I also agree with regard to most of your client suggestions and about your good faith comments.
  
  Alex: I think the reason for building something new is that there is a demand for features that don't exist in legacy applications. But I do agree that a federated search is important.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2004
  Alex: I agree that NNTP (like all the other old protocols written for low-bandwidth usage) is hacky. Your solution is more what I had in mind, just written in a much clearer way :)
  
  What I meant with extending NNTP, was more along the lines of allowing current NNTP clients and servers to be extended in an easy fashion, rather than ripping out the current plumbing and replacing it with something brand new.
  
  The technical solution really does not matter that much, as long as it is not a proprietary protocol and developers for other platforms are brought on board at an early stage. This will allow servers, web clients and smart/offline clients to interoperate across the board.
  
  Josh: I agree with the firewall issue and this will become much bigger in future. However, the use of port 80/443 just shifts the problem for now, rather than solves it. The reason companies block outgoing ports at the firewall is to control Internet usage. In future these same companies will use stateful inspection firewalls with application-level filtering in the same way to block access to future protocols that pushes everything through the web ports.
  
  
  
  

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2004
  But Josh, Web interfaces right now are bloated and IMHO doesn't lend themselves to searching [aka Google groups]. The small screen view, the lack of offline, the fact that people don't even know that they can see answers under the "+" and we have to repost... I understand that NNTP is "old" but you are going to have to really get anything web based up to the same "durability" of NNTP for most of the folks that answer the questions of the people that use the Web interfaces.
  
  Web based newsreaders slow me down big time.

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2004
  Susan: I for one agree, I won't use web-based support forums due to the clunky feel and difficulty of usage, however I don't think anyone has been arguing for just a web interface. The system would certainly HAVE to support a non-webui based(and preferabbly non-http based) protocol that can be used for both offline clients and intercommunication between peer sites(reputation, etc would need to be transferred). IMHO switching over to entirely HTTP(be it web based or just HTTP endpoints where the protocol flows through) is, in effect, going from one old protocol to another that has more problems. I think this proposed system has to be more than just a collection of stateless web services.
  
  Using a technology like xml(which, IMHO, is significantly better than mime headers and the mime dividing system, which are a touch inconsistent and not fun to write a parser for) to encapsulate the message and commands should make it fairly easy for clients to be written. However, there is the problem of bloat(xml command would probably be atleast a few dozen bytes larger) and general anti-xmlism. There is also the problem of "everybody has to write an extension". One of the major things I dislike about xml is that its flexibilty results in featureladden messages, sometimes with duplicated information(this is one of the problems I have with RSS).
  
  IMHO, its possible to divise something that is both better featurewise, of equal or better quality durability, flexibilty and usability wise, and easier to write an implementation too. However, as I've said a few times, I'm not convinced it can be done with HTTP.

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