Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: using netnews to provide free Third-Voice-like services

Author:Seth Gordon
Posted:10/18/1999; 2:24:50 PM
Topic:using netnews to provide free Third-Voice-like services
Msg #:12137 (In response to 12134)
Prev/Next:12136 / 12138

True, netnews messages occasionally get mangled or drop into the abyss, creating headaches for news administrators. However, requiring a central server leads to a different set of administrative headaches: who is responsible (financially and politically) for the server's network connection, disk space, and administration? What happens if use of the protocol grows much more quickly than the server can add resources, or if a backhoe cuts through that server's connection to the rest of the Net, or if the server's administration pulls the plug without leaving a forwarding address?

With netnews, these problems are basically spread throughout the Net; you reduce the probability of one big failure, but you increase the probability of small failures. For an application like this, I think that's an acceptable trade-off.

Also, if you send a query to a central server, you expect instant gratification; if it takes a few days for a netnews message to propagate, most people don't consider this a terrible thing. The announcements that this protocol is supposed to deal with are not very time-sensitive, so latency is not such a big deal.

Finally, you can build the central-server system on top of the netnews-based protocol, just as deja.com is built on top of netnews. Just set up z.userland.com to (a) suck up everything posted to misc.url-links, and (b) allow users to query z.userland.com's database through a Web or XML-RPC interface. If X is afraid that his or her posted links are not getting through, he or she can query z.userland.com for his or her own messages.

X and Y will need access to news servers. Why not have it be access to an XML server...
Because access to a news server is a standard part of plain-vanilla Internet access, so it's included in your bill from the ISP (or the bill that the ISP sends to the companies who advertise on it). Access to an XML server is less readily available.





This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:06 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.