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> Interface - UI made it easy to scan many posts quickly This is the thing I really miss. The NNTP client I used in the late 90 / early 00s had a far better UX
by dspillett 7y ago
> Interface - UI made it easy to scan many posts quickly
This is the thing I really miss. The NNTP client I used in the late 90 / early 00s had a far better UX for dealing with large groups and complex nested threads (such as those seen in groups I used to frequent like comp.language.* and alt.fan.pratchett) than anything I've seen implemented via HTTP+HTML since.
Part of that is due to bandwidth constraints no doubt: the client was working from a local database of content that the UI was pulling data from for display so achieving everything it did on "old web" tech could impose a massive bandwidth cost on the provider and UI latency cost on the user, but with modern UAs this could be largely replicated with the various client-side storage options. There would still be an issue for users who moved between different browser instances regularly, a bunch of "read/purged/etc" data would need to be synced between clients via the service which increases the design complexity, but something noticeably better than most (all) web based forums offer should be eminently possible.
- talkingtab 7y agodoes anyone have a screenshot of the usenet UI or an easy way to see it? A couple of people have mentioned this.
- pwg 7y agoYou can find several screen shots in the different client web pages linked from this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders