I agree that NNTP is nice, it is however lacking some features that forums offer these days.
Ideally there would be a push to a new version of the protocol that adds these features (and more such as using hashcash to combat spam).
I see what you mean with this. I think NNTP is still a great protocol for discussions, it's just that over the years it got a bad rap for being a warez/porn haven.
The server/client mechanism is robust and scalable. With a good client UI, it could be turned into quite a smart social/work platform.
I've been toying with attempting such a NNTP client, but it's way down on my list of projects.
I think that NNTP making a comeback would be better than a simpler HTTP or adding more features to Gopher. But people can already have that with a Reddit clone or phpbb.
Yes, I think a bridge to NNTP would also be helpful. The ability to post through NNTP might be good too.
This would provide some of the listed features when using a suitable NNTP client; my own NNTP client called "bystand" supports SQL (it stores all data in a SQLite database; if you use the SQLite FTS extension then full text search is available), but other clients may have different features, so may be more suitable for your use possibly.
(I think that all web forums and mailing lists should be NNTP instead. It is OK to have a web interface too as long as the NNTP server and message ID can be read from the web interface (even if JavaScript and CSS is disabled), so that if you are given links to the web interface then you can access the NNTP if you want to do. It would also be possible to provide a email interface too if wanted.)
A NNTP service could definitely still work, but it would have to be a lot more locked down. I really hate that the alternative is web forums which are always stuck with a small fraction of the functionality of any good news reader and get bogged down easily if they get popular and never have a good search feature.
One can improve on NNTP, add verified identities etc. You can do so via GnuPG and some combination of software bits.
Usenet was built just for this, I don't understand why people don't use it widely. Forums are such POS for this kind of thing, they fragment the field make it impossible to search for a discussion in any sort of uniform way.
NNTP with enforced GPG authentication and PoW like spam prevention could work today (in the narrow technical sense, not in the wide product sense.) It wouldn't even be that large of a lift from current NNTP architecture. Create a moderated Usenet group that only accepts posts that complete a PoW challenge and that sign their messages.
NNTP still survives. The D language forums are based on NNTP. It's nice to have forums that are text only (no emojis), no signatures, no ads, no fat borders, etc. I also wrote an archiver for it that creates static web pages out of the threads.
The Internet has become synonymous with the web/http protocol. The web alternatives to NNTP won instead of newer versions of Usenet. New versions of IRC, UUCP, S/FTP, SMTP, etc., instead of webifying everything would be nice. But those services are still there and fill an important niche for those not interested in seeing everything eternal septembered.
The author of the article isn't really referring to binaries. NNTP was wonderful for text-based discussion. It still could be, but not having moderation to alleviate spam/etc is a real concern.
NNTP is one of the most under-rated internet protocols IMO. Solved a lot of problems that are worth solving, even in domains even further from its original purpose than this. Also, if I could use a news reader for HN I could take advantage of a local killfile. ;)
Unfortunately NNTP(like) is the only thing I have never touched at all. I have several years of experience with FidoNet's echomail (this is like NNTP), but today I see that most of discussion is done in mailing lists and I have got no usecases I really could use with something like NNTP (and that is disappointing, because I really like that echomail/news nature).
NNTP is just the right abstraction to wrap any discussion-based thing. It would be nice to have just nntp://news.ycombinator.com, nntp://reddit.com and so on instead of bunch of incompatible APIs actually. It's like beautiful Perl's TIE [1] where you wrap an object in it and it exposed as regular scalar, array, hash or filehandle instead of 'an object' with it's own methods users need to learn to use it.
I think Gmane 2.0, if it ever will be born, would have a mechanism of plugins, that allow easy wrapping any web-forum in it, by writing a little template describing the layout of pages like 'this is topic, this is message body' and so on. And the crawler to use the plugins, of course.
There doesn't need to be an "interface" for NNTP and especially not a web based one. The NNTP client in the old Mozilla products from the '90s was just fine and threaded messages well.
The original post you responded to mentioned that NNTP did not have a replacement, so I don't see how it could be improved/maintained if it's just not there anymore.
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