From: "Jörg W Mittag" <JoergWMittag+Ruby@...>
Date: 2010-04-17T22:17:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Reading Ruby-Talk in Atom or RSS

steve ross wrote:
> The recent "moderation" thread raised several questions in my mind. I'm interested in what others are doing about this:
> 
> 1. Is there a decent threaded RSS or Atom reader on OSX? One not inside an email client?
> 2. Is there a way to subscribe to ruby-talk but not receive email? AFICT, it's email and either on or off.
> 3. Is there an RSS or Atom feed for ruby-talk other than from the mirrors?
> 
> Sorry for all the questions, but the "moderation" thread raised an
> important point: Grouping by thread and reading in a news reader
                                                       ^^^^^^^^^^^

> may be preferable to getting individual emails. Worth a try.

Man, am I really *that* old? To me, "news reader" means "Usenet 
client", not "feed reader".

Which, incidentally, is how *I* read ruby-talk, ehm sorry, I meant it 
is how I read *comp.lang.ruby*. And it works like a charm, mainly 
because, unlike e-mail, RSS and Atom, Usenet was *specifically 
designed* for discussion.

Threading works perfectly, because proper threading support is 
actually a required part of the standard since day 1. Unlike e-mail, 
where threading only works if both the sender and the recipient 
implement it properly (and it is *not* a required part of the 
standard, so there *are* actually mail clients which *don't* do it 
properly, including this thing called GMail that you might have heard 
of).

[Actually, to be fair, there are sometimes threading problems. But 
they don't happen in the Usenet. They only happen when someone uses a 
broken e-mail program to post to ruby-talk and then the 
ruby-talk-to-comp.lang.ruby gateway can't figure out which thread the 
mail belongs to.]

It's basically an instance of "use the right tool for the job". E-mail 
is for 1-1 communication, Atom is for 1-many, Usenet is for many-many. 
Ruby-talk is many-many, ergo Usenet is the only sane choice.

Anyway, this doesn't really answer your question, but it is a viable 
alternate solution. It's pretty simple, really: all Usenet clients 
have awesome threading support, because a) the standard requires it 
and b) they would be useless otherwise. (There are newsgroups which 
get literally several orders of magnitude more traffic than 
comp.lang.ruby, Usenet clients simply *have* to have good support for 
threading and filtering.)

That was my 2c.

jwm