on 2010 Apr 27 9:47 PM
As an addition to Justin's question about nested conversations, a recent thread in the replication newsgroup showed me two advantages of NNTP that I'm somewhat missing in SQLA:
Accept several answers as "the accepted one". - That may be a need if several contributors help to solve/clarify a topic, and it's hard to tell which one is more relevant.
=> As a workaround, maybe one should compose a further answer to sum up those answers and acept that one. However, that has a drawback on the reputation system (if that matters). A simple addition to an answer by someone else by editing the existing answer seems not possible at the time being because of lack of reputation (at least in my case).
Comment on several statements of a response - something that is usually done in NNTP by "See my remarks inline" and then quote parts of the response and then inline comments to each paragraph.
=> In SQLA, there is no ability to comment on paragraphs and the like so one would have to add several comments and possibly introduce them with "@Nickname: W.r.t. your 2nd paragraph, I think ...". - Doable but not as precisely located, methinks. Maybe that is a side effect of the focus on answers instead of discussions...
Are you missing those abilities here, too, or are there better workarounds/solutions in SQLA?
(Sidenote: Sorry for summing up two points - they just seem related...)
Request clarification before answering.
There is no ability to mark anything as an "accepted answer" in NNTP, let alone mark two responses as both being accepted answers... there is no way to mark anything as anything, no editing whatsoever, no up or down or accepted, no fixing speling misteaks, everything is fire and forget.
Yes, the ability of NNTP clients to paste the original text into a response is missing from the SQLA software. Automatically quoting text is a historical oddity from the days before modern NNTP clients let you quickly browse old messages... think of the days before copy and paste, think early email. The ability to edit quoted text builds on that... Does anyone really miss it?
I'll tell you what I don't miss: I don't miss having to scroll through hundreds of lines of copied text to get to the reply at the bottom because some people think bottom posting is a good idea. I don't miss responses growing and growing and growing in size because text is automatically copied and folks don't delete it. I don't miss having to delete the copied text when writing a response.
If for some reason there is a need to quote the original text, there are ways; e.g., paste and blockquote:
something that is usually done in NNTP by "See my remarks inline" and then quote parts of the response and then inline comments to each paragraph.
IMO I would rather have to work at quoting than have it automatic and then have to work at deleting... on NNTP, I am always deleting useless text that folks have already seen, very rarely quoting anything. I switch back and forth every day, NNTP to SQLA, and I don't miss any part of NNTP...
...well, that's not true; I miss the fact that more people are still using the newsgroups.
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While I generally agree with your NNTP "rant" (and also wonder why lots of folks stick to the newsgroups), the advantage (and sometimes the curse) of NNTP IMHO is its hierarchical order. In SQLA, there's only one question and n answers, and it's not so obvious to relate in an answer to other answers as they might be ordered differently tomorrow based on changing reputation, and that might make it more hard to follow the chronological order.
@Breck: The one thing I'm really missing from NNTP are your typical "Breck The NameOfTheDay" signatures:)
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