Any Advanced Developers NNTP Around?

[clintonG]

It has become painfully clear to me how useful it would be if it were
possible to grab an entire topical tree from a specific newsgroup and
archive it as XML enabling it to be republished in a webpage.

I wonder if this is even possible?

<%= Clinton Gallagher
METROmilwaukee (sm) "A Regional Information Service"
NET csgallagher AT metromilwaukee.com
URL http://metromilwaukee.com/
URL http://clintongallagher.metromilwaukee.com/

 

[Danny Tuppeny]

What's wrong with Google groups? ;o)

I'm in the process of building a newsreader (similar to Outlook Express) and
started from this tutorial:

http://www.csharphelp.com/archives2/archive451.html

I don't imagine it'd be too hard for you to adopt..? Store your messages in
classes referencing their parents/children, and it should be quite simple to
recurse through outputting some XML!

 

[clintonG]

Google groups is clumsy and does not isolate the data in a manner that would
be useful for forensic purposes although in that context Google groups does
prove useful as an archive where one could reliably state the data could not
realistically be altered by a 3rd party. Its clumsy to carry Google into a
lawyer's office or a court room for example and use the data in a manner
that would be conducive to illustrating a given topical thread but given a
tool that could make a 'copy' of such data could prove very valuable.
Furthermore, Google groups does not provide a means to reuse the data in a
web page.

Danny, if you are going to put the effort into working with Usenet I would
suggest you think about develping this solution before you take on building
yet another reader. I contend a 'reader' in this context is an opportunity
waiting to happen.

I'm still a lame and too busy working on a demanding project to try this
myself. As I would like the opportunity to re-publish a topic posted to a
newsgroup in a website I know I would be interested in such a solution
myself.

<%= Clinton Gallagher

 

[Alex]

Do you think of something like I've done on http://www.Dotnet42.com,
especially http://www.dotnet42.com/NG_HotTopics/rss.xml

Alex
DotNet42 - The Answer to Your .NET Question

 

[clintonG]

You da' man Alex -- but -- and it may be a really big but -- the ideal
solution needs to capture the entire topical tree, transformed to XML and
enable the XML to be loaded into a control such as the ASP.NET 2.0 TreeView
with support for a caption that is a linked anchor which could load the
originating newsgroup or load the same topical tree from an archive such as
Google provides. Are we on the same 'page' with regard to how useful this
would be?

Besides the forensic value it could also be used as an instant "FAQmachine"
as so many people have contributed so much of their personal time in the
newsgroups and there is gold in them thar' hills which is not reusable on
the web unless patronizing Google.

Man it would be a sweet deal to highlight the entire thread of a topic
displayed in OE and drag and drop into the Visual Studio editor where a
control would do the rest of the processing when the page was compiled. Just
ideas I've been thinking about for awhile.

<%= Clinton Gallagher

 

[clintonG]

<snip />

Doh. I didn't even click any of the links and just reloaded the example page
and observed you do capture the entire topical tree.

Yes, you are da' man Alex.

<%= Clinton Gallagher