Saturday, December 08, 2007

i hate web forums

there, i said it, i hate web forums... i can't stand going to this web forum and then that web forum and then the other web forum (i hate doing that with normal websites too, that's why i love rss feeds)... i wish i could read all these web forums in thunderbird somehow, or better still, i wish these twits who decide they want to run a forum get a clue and use usenet instead - that's what it's there for... gaaa!

and yes, i know some forums have rss feeds, but rss is the wrong format for discussions (there's no threading in rss) and many that i'm interested in don't support unauthenticated feeds so my feed reader has to be able to log on as me, and guess what, google reader can't do that...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i could go on and on with respect to this topic. i think my biggest gripe would be people who reply on a thread with a comment like "ha ha yeah totally" or "no, you can't do it like that [but i'm not going to say why or give an alternative or any sort of helpful feedback]". gaaaa!! do these people have lives, i barely have time to get through all my feeds and forums let a lone write reponses that have a net usefulness of 0.

kurt wismer said...

yeah, time is a problem i encounter too... that's actually why i wish i could aggregate forum access into one place the way usenet works... it could do for forums what feed readers do for blogs...

Anonymous said...

it would be a chore, for sure. you'd basically have to write a separate aggregator for each forum implementation out there, since none of them have a common api. you'd probably have to install each of them, and play around with them. then, after all that, you'd have to design the app. i would make it a web app, so that you can sell advertising once everyone starts using it.

kurt wismer said...

well, that's one option - another is to make it a thunderbird extension... there's already precedent for the thunderbird route by way of the webmail extension and the satellite extensions it uses for each webmail provider...

i think i'm going to go google this some more...