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If its dead, is there a successor?

For those who didn't know:

The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles (aka netnews), as well as transferring news among news servers.

vvvvv
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Jason
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9 Answers9

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NNTP isn't dead. It just smells funny.

Sadly, these days if you want to follow 10 different forums then you need to have 10 different accounts and learn 10 different UIs. I like being able to pick the newsreader that I like and have the same interface for all of my newsgroups. OpenID may bring some of this back, but I'm afraid that the "new internet" just doesn't care about interoperability like the "old internet" did.

Andru Luvisi
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    Do you know you can read StackOverflow in a feedreader? See my answer below. – Davide Nov 04 '08 at 21:25
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    It's all about the ad-impressions. :-/ RSS is *NOT* NNTP, sorry. I read SO in Google Reader, and it's a poor replacement for the venerable NNTP. – Chris K Aug 05 '09 at 19:57
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    Agreed, I want NNTP comes back! As every user, I dislike regressions. And this one is one of worst of Internet history. I want an unified interface (UI and API) for all forums. I want threaded discussion. I want to do cross-posting. (Hey, is someone wants to create a successor standard for NNTP?) – Jérôme Pouiller Aug 19 '13 at 14:01
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It is not dead, but still used by guys who do prefer plain-text over animated emoticons and flashy ad-banners.

Seriously, I have been using it since ten years and I cannot detect any drop in the number of articles or users.

Black
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    The recent attempted crackdown on kiddie porn that resulted in some of the big ISPs dropping it does seem to have dropped the message volume in some groups. – Loren Pechtel Nov 04 '08 at 20:58
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It's not dead - there's still plenty of traffic in the public C# group, for instance.

StackOverflow is becoming a pseudo-successor - but only for some kinds of threads. Q&A threads are ideally suited to SO; discussion threads don't work nearly as well here as they do in newsgroups.

Jon Skeet
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    I'm supposed to get an extra 100 points reputation when Jon Skeet answers my question, no? :) – Jason Mar 27 '10 at 18:21
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I have never been on Usenet. But I use several “private” NNTP servers (disconnected from Usenet), including the awesome NNTP interface to mailing lists: http://gmane.org/

Edit: oh and none of those servers I use needs an "account". Yet they're quite spam-free.

Nicolás
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I know many people like myself who still use nntp / usenet on a daily basis. It is an absolutely invaluable tool. I doubt it will go away anytime soon.

It's like the pinball machine of online communities. All the new kids may not know what it's all about and may think it is dead, but it is still alive and kicking and there's still nothing that can compare.

Bryan Oakley
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It's not dead (yet?) but it's being replaced by feeds and feedreader (RSS and Atom)

Davide
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    How is RSS replacing NNTP? They are completely different... aren't they? – Jason Nov 04 '08 at 20:54
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    Not at all! Take web-based newsgroup services like Google group. You can read it in an feedreader, like you did with your NNTP client. And as Glomek says, now there are different forums with different login. What he missed is that (often) you can read all of them in a unique place: your feedreader – Davide Nov 04 '08 at 21:24
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    Can you post from the feedreader? – Brian Knoblauch Nov 04 '08 at 21:37
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    Sort of, but surely not in the same way you did with the newsreader and not (yet?) in a standard way. The preferred way of posting (at present) is replying via email. GoogleReader let you create your own feed (which "feels" like an answer but it's not) – Davide Nov 04 '08 at 21:42
  • forgot to mention: the email reply would appear on the forum (or in the blog as comment), I don't mean just reply via email to the author – Davide Nov 04 '08 at 21:44
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    Yes, there is a standard way to post to a feed. It's called AtomPub, and it's the access protocol for Atom feeds. It's even got extensions for threading, so you certainly _could_ replace NNTP forums with it. But I don't recommend it. – Joseph Holsten Aug 05 '09 at 19:44
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It's nowhere near as relevant as it once was. Nowadays any popular forum is going to be web-based. For example, stackoverflow would be very crap if based around NNTP. You just can't provide the same experience when your interaction with the forum software is so limited.

Another big problem is that you can't display a CAPTCHA over NNTP, or indeed provide any other modern interactive anti-spam measure.

I'd say yes, it's practically dead.

fwzgekg
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  • Is there a successor? Or are there only one-off solutions here and there? – Jason Nov 04 '08 at 21:06
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    Practically dead? I'm thinking you don't have an NNTP account and you're not aware of the volume of traffic! –  Mar 30 '09 at 20:18
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    You don't need an NNTP account to get access to Usenet, just poke around Google Groups. You might also notice that you can “display a CAPTCHA over NNTP” about as well as you can display one over HTTP. The concepts are unrelated. The issue is that posts will be mirrored between servers, so any one server's attempts to clean up the web are marginal. CAPTCHA can't get spam off Usenet any better that it can keep Google from displaying spam in search results. – Joseph Holsten Aug 05 '09 at 19:55
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Agreed, NNTP's time is past. We have good connectivity; there is no need to replicate data across multiple servers any more. I use Google Groups in preference to NNTP.

However, NNTP does provide some community assurance against catastrophic failure. There's probably an open-source project in there somewhere for web-based forums to provide this kind of distributed, fault-tolerant, load-balanced services.

Chui Tey
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    I'll politely disagree instead of downvoting you. I'm glad you recognize that Google is not some magic solution to errors and failures. Most “web-based forums” that want distributed, fault-tolerant, and load-balanced services start with those services and built the website on top. Which means they slap a web interface on a usenet group, not the other way around. – Joseph Holsten Aug 05 '09 at 19:49
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    Could you point to a web interface that provides all the threading that nntp supports with its references? – mmmmmm Apr 14 '11 at 12:48
  • YOU have good Internet connectivity. 50% of the global population has none. Slow, intermittent and/or expensive access for a sizable chunk of the world. – Phil Lello Apr 07 '16 at 10:20
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The only true NNTP Replacement could be Mailing lists. Not any web-based forum.

wtfxyz
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