CC'ing Comments to Newsgroup

[rcseege]

I occasionally post comments to perlmonks, and usually the comments are Perl/Tk specific. One thing I'd like to be able to do would be to optionally cc a specified newsgroup (c.l.p.tk). It might be nice if the generated message also included a URL back to the node and/or thread, to make it easy for others to pick up on the discussion if they wish.

I see this as being a benefit for those who might not normally visit perlmonks and stick to newsgroups. In addition, these CC'd posts would be searchable within newsgroup archives. With backlinks, It might also bring more users to this site. Just a thought...

Rob

[Tanktalus]

In order to make that work...

1. Perlmonks would need to integrate an NNTP feed. (Not really trivial - sure, Net::NNTP makes part of it easy, but then there's deciding on how/where to store the local copies)
2. Perlmonks would need to allow the newsgroup to cross-post back. Most sites won't cross-post to an unknown newsgroup. This kinda makes it awkward.
Further, I'm not sure that the newsgroup community would necessarily take kindly to this type of website advertising. It just feels wrong to me.

I don't think most people would complain if you posted to c.l.p.tk a message that said, "I posted a problem at http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?... and was wondering if anyone here had any idea, either. Specifically, the problem is ..." But asking someone to fire up a browser from their newsreader to participate? While I'm sure many (most?) people are willing to do so, demanding it is somewhat presumptuous, IMO. That includes both reading the problem and responding to it. Most people don't take kindly to requests to "reply via email, please" - I don't imagine that "reply via perlmonks" will be taken much better.

For example, I've posted at least three module bug reports via rt.cpan.org that referenced posts on perlmonks, but I never made the reader of the report come to PM to find out the problem - they could if they wanted to see more context, but I tried to keep each message self-contained within their existing context. I've not thought about cross-posting PM messages to newsgroups, although I have to admit that my newsgroup reader is way nicer to type in than this text area box ;-)

[rcseege]

You raised some good points, and at the end of the day I really wonder if enough people would find the feature useful enough to merit its inclusion even though I still think it would be handy for me... It's not too difficult to see how this feature could be abused and unnecessarily anger others, though I have to say if given the choice between something that is on topic, but copied from another site, and spam from a drug company, I know what I'd rather see ;-)

Still, I think I was considering a more modest capability than what you suggested. If I'm a user asking a question, then by cross-pointing it, I'm implicitly saying that I'm willing to check Perlmonks and the newsgroup for possible responses. I wouldn't expect newsgroup replies to be automatically fed into Perlmonks. A responder is going to either A) Go to Perlmonks to reply, or reply to the newsgroup. I expect that this would not be a common use case. Many come to Perlmonks for a greater signal/noise ratio than they get from newsgroups.

I would expect that this might be used more often by individuals who create a response to a question that they feel is worth the trouble of cross posting, because it might deliver value even if some of the context is lost. The cross-poster may even provide the additional context. Not all posts to Perlmonks are responses to questions though... There are nodes posted to snippets, Cool uses, etc that are often standalone.

Thanks for the thoughtful response

Rob

[Happy-the-monk]

A couple of years ago, I had been thinking like you do.

I had seen all these different approaches to online communities, newsgroups, web boards like the German language perl-community.de, Perl Monks and other Wikis and boards...
They have their fans, and each of them likes the way his favored thing works and looks and feels.

So I thought, we have it all there. There's LWP, there's Net:NNTP, there's WWW::Mechanize.
So (almost) all it would need to be perfect is a common data format and lossless converters, right?

    ...

I was thinking about culture then, and dropped the plan =)

Cheers, Sören

[blazar]

While I glaze at the idea of an integrated communication network (about a specific topic, that is) comprising a NNTP interface, a mailing list, a web-based forum, and possibly even instant-messaging and chats (in such a way that conversations may be digested and exported to the other media for further discussion), all with full interoperability, I understand that such a beast would require an infrastructure that cannot be an afterthought and goes far beyond the current capabilities of PM.

All in all I strongly doubt that that would be a feature that could be easily added.

[Aristotle]

Just post your question here, then post a link to it on Usenet, together with a short summary. (This is crucial – a naked link will be ignored and might even irk people.)

Perl Mouse’s approach is the opposite, which I believe won’t work nearly as well. Links to PerlMonks are just much more likely to be stable than pointers to web-based Usenet archives tend to be, in my experience.

[Perl Mouse]

People point to message-IDs all the time - in fact, every Usenet reply contains one or more (unless really broken software is being used). I wasn't suggesting pointing to web-based archives directly. (Although, given a message-ID, using a web-based archive to retrieve the message is a possibility).

I don't believe my approach is going to work though - but that's because I don't believe the OP's suggestion was going to work either. I only put up my suggestion so people would say "Why should I go to Usenet to answer a question?". I don't believe a significant number of people on Usenet would go elsewhere to answer a question.

People tend to pick zero, one or more forums to communicate. Many people on Perlmonks have expressed they will never go (or return) to Usenet. Many people on Usenet hate web based forums. There are Perl people that participate on Usenet groups that don't like Perlmonks. On the other hand, there are many people who already participate both on Perlmonks, and on Usenet.

So, who's going to benefit from any cross-forum scheme? Not the people participating on both forums already. It will certainly piss-off people who don't want to participate in the other forum.

I don't think it will work. Perlmonks isn't Usenet - if it was, there wouldn't be a point of having Perlmonks.

The only think that might work is if you create a decicated newsgroup, for instance, alt.perl.monk with the specific purpose of creating cross-forum traffic. Kind of similar to the NNTP-to-mailinglist gateways. But that's different from injecting Perlmonks postings into an existing newsgroup.

[Aristotle]

The point is not to get the Usenet people to reply on PerlMonks, I don’t think so. The point is to post the same thing in multiple venues, with ensuing discussion in each, to get wider coverage.

Ovid posted pointers and a summary of his recent module naming question here on PerlMonks to use Perl and to the perl-xml list also – and maybe to another one or two places I don’t know about as well.

It worked handily, I think.

It’s all in how you go about it.

[Perl Mouse]

Well, you can simple start the other way around. Post your questions on Usenet, put up a link to the posting here. If you aren't getting downvoted, and people move from Perlmonks to Usenet to answer your question, you've proved that people are willing to switch medium to answer your question. Else you've shown that people aren't willing to switch from Perlmonks to Usenet to answer your question - and hence it's unlikely they'll move from Usenet to Perlmonks to answer your question.