Re: gnews-hows it going?

[Daniel Wood <daniel cs washington edu>]

Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> writes:

> 	<soapbox>
> 	Combining mail and news is dumb.  While many operations are
> 	common to both, it is important to separate the two in the mind
> 	of the user.
> 	</soapbox>

Mail and news are exactly the same thing.

What's gnome-list?  (I read mailing lists in my newsreader, of course.)

What's comp.risks?  (Or another highly-moderated, extremely low-bandwidth
news groups?)

What about when an old friend sends email to a few (or maybe 10)
mutual friends to say "hi', and folks start to catch up, and all of a
sudden you've got a tiny newsgroup in your inbox that wasn't there
yesterday?

So, OK, mail and news aren't the same thing.  They're two different
protocals, that's for sure.  And they're also used to describe (vaguely)
two different types of dialogue.

The are definately important differences between forums that people
need to be aware of.  These differences are only poorly captured by
calling some mail and some news.

Daniel.