Yeah, I still don't know why Lars wouldn't let them have the existing front-end code. I understand that maybe it wasn't pretty under the hood, but who cares?

Yeah, I still don't know why Lars wouldn't let them have the existing front-end code. I understand that maybe it wasn't pretty under the hood, but who cares? It worked great for many years and was extremely useful. It could always be cleaned up and refactored a bit at a time. Now they're having to reinvent the wheel. And while I shan't presume to tell them how to do it (especially since it's at their expense), I wonder if the infrastructure they're cooking up will be as future-proof. It certainly won't be as simple to reimplement if Gmane changes hands again someday, and it won't be conducive to setting up other instances of Gmane on a smaller scale.