Web-Based Message Boards with Offline Reader?

Biedermann asks: "I have been looking for web based messageboard for ages. The Problem is: the users should be able to log in, get the new messages, log out and read/write offline. Not everybody has low-cost-always-on-broadband access to the net. All the programs I could find were either not keeping promises or fell unmaintained years ago in beta. Is there any such beast? Or would it be possible to do such a thing with Slashcode or Squishdot? (I'm not a coder, so I don't know what it takes)" I've been thinking about writing something like this for Slashcode but haven't yet had the time. Do you all think this would be a worthwhile application?

USE NNTP!

[Alan Shutko]

If you do this, use NNTP or some sort of gateway. There are a plethora of offline readers for them, they are more featureful than just spewing the messages out over email or some web-specific client.

This will require that people learn to configure a newsreader, but those who are concerned about their online time are more often to have one already.

Re:USE NNTP!

[dead_penguin]

That would also solve problems with the user interface. IMO, many web discussion boards are just plain ugly and put together so poorly that they are almost impossible to use effectively. Also, you'd have the option to set up your own kill-files to limit what posts you see and don't see. Now *that* is something I'd love to be able to do here on /. every other day!

mailing lists for the bandwidth challanged

[yzorderex]

I never use web based discussion groups. Some like egroups have both so everything shows up in a mailbox as text. Much faster to deal with a list of text based messages than any kind of pick-and-choose web based intermediate thingy.
For sites like slashdot I grab the whole page of comments nested. Even with 4-500 comments to a page this is better than figuring out what I want online
(ADSL coming Real Soon Now :-)

A Couple of solutions

[Crewd]

As others have mentioned, go with NNTP. This is the method I would use. Just set up a private news server and everyone can use their favorite newsreader to d/l the messages and read/write offline.

You could also have people try an offline web browser...several windows versions are listed at http://www.davecentral.com/offline.html . This won't let them write offline (well they can always type it up in their favorite text editor and copy and paste), but they will be able to read the messages offline.

Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

on what boards you're trying to surf. If you're focused on investing-related stuff, this works quite well:

http://www.diligentdingo.com/ [diligentdingo.com]

It surfs Yahoo, Motley Fool, Silicon Investor, and Raging Bull, prefetching messages for you.

Re:USE NNTP!

[joshwa]

Towards that end, one program that has both web and NNTP interfaces is Web Crossing [webcrossing.com]. Non-free (free as in beer for under 1000 pageviews/day), but it satisfies the requirements. WCTL is okay as a templating language; it also supports server-side JavaScript. Runs on Linux and NT. Are there any OSS packages that offer this functionality?

Very useful outside US/Canada!

[Cato]

Anyone who lives in Europe, Asia, or other places outside US/Canada is very likely to be paying for Internet access by the minute (local calls are not free). Although some countries are moving towards special internet access deals for flat fees, at least in the UK these ISPs are massively oversubscribed.

Travellers outside US/Canada can also make use of this feature; global roaming services such as gric.net also charge by the minute for the convenience of using any ISP in their scheme.

Re:USE NNTP!

[Biedermann]

The problem in this specific case is that the forum that is now used is located on CompuServe and most of the people are non-(computer)-techies. So it has to be as simple as possible. (CIS is doing its best to change into AOL2, so many of the people in professional forums are getting fed up with the way the customers are treated)
But I reckon that setting up a news client should be possible (for most...). The drawback is that it needs its own server but one beautiful plus is taht it's platform independent, whereas an offline reader for a web forum would have to ported.
Thanks!

Gnus

[vsync64]

Gnus [gnus.org] lets you do this for Slashdot...

furng

[gmhowell]

Not to toot my own horn, but I just started a project at furng.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] and sourceforge.net/projects/furng [sourceforge.net] to do precisely that. Still in the navel picking stage (ie, planning) but I hope it will be more general than options listed so far.

To answer the question from Cliff, yes, it would be very useful. Lots of folks still pay by the minute for internet/phone access (mostly non-US) and it's much easier to use a screenreader on a terminal based client. Lynx and friends? I've heard that while they work better than Netscape and IE for the last purpose, they aren't the best.