steve ross wrote:
The recent “moderation” thread raised several questions in my mind. I’m interested in what others are doing about this:
- Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?
- Is there a way to subscribe to ruby-talk but not receive email? AFICT, it’s email and either on or off.
- Is there an RSS or Atom feed for ruby-talk other than from the mirrors?
Sorry for all the questions, but the “moderation” thread raised an
important point: Grouping by thread and reading in a news reader
^^^^^^^^^^^
may be preferable to getting individual emails. Worth a try.
Man, am I really that old? To me, “news reader” means “Usenet
client”, not “feed reader”.
Which, incidentally, is how I read ruby-talk, ehm sorry, I meant it
is how I read comp.lang.ruby. And it works like a charm, mainly
because, unlike e-mail, RSS and Atom, Usenet was specifically
designed for discussion.
Threading works perfectly, because proper threading support is
actually a required part of the standard since day 1. Unlike e-mail,
where threading only works if both the sender and the recipient
implement it properly (and it is not a required part of the
standard, so there are actually mail clients which don’t do it
properly, including this thing called GMail that you might have heard
of).
[Actually, to be fair, there are sometimes threading problems. But
they don’t happen in the Usenet. They only happen when someone uses a
broken e-mail program to post to ruby-talk and then the
ruby-talk-to-comp.lang.ruby gateway can’t figure out which thread the
mail belongs to.]
It’s basically an instance of “use the right tool for the job”. E-mail
is for 1-1 communication, Atom is for 1-many, Usenet is for many-many.
Ruby-talk is many-many, ergo Usenet is the only sane choice.
Anyway, this doesn’t really answer your question, but it is a viable
alternate solution. It’s pretty simple, really: all Usenet clients
have awesome threading support, because a) the standard requires it
and b) they would be useless otherwise. (There are newsgroups which
get literally several orders of magnitude more traffic than
comp.lang.ruby, Usenet clients simply have to have good support for
threading and filtering.)
That was my 2c.
jwm