mapping of NI forums to Usenet

[msg]

Greetings:

Which NI forums map to Usenet newsgroups? Do posts made to
nntp servers not in the natinst.com domain propagate to
NI forums?

A quick check of active posts in 'comp.lang.labview'
suggests that posts made to hosts other than
'tekken.natinst.com' aren't getting replies.

Clarification appreciated.

Michael Grigoni
Cybertheque Museum

[Kevin Valentine]

Hi Michael,

My listing shows 29 NI forums on newsgroups.natinst.com. I've posted
using Verizon's news server in the past. They only listed
comp.lang.labview and it took longer for my posts to show on the forum.
That's why I switched to NI's server.

I don't know all the finer details of how usenet works. I guess that
people with dial-up or simply far away from the NI server would want to
use a server that's closer to them.

Perhaps you're on to something that the rest of with news readers should
know. Do you think our posts aren't showing up if we use other news
servers that host NI forums?

-kevin

[msg]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your reply.


> My listing shows 29 NI forums on newsgroups.natinst.com.

Thanks for the reference to this host; I will use it. 'Supernews'
only carries 'comp.lang.labview' which is the only NI related group
of which I was aware on Usenet -- it predates all these private NI
'forums', of which I only became aware when inspecting some of the
posts in 'comp.lang.labview' which referred to other 'forums'.
>
> Perhaps you're on to something that the rest of with news readers should
> know. Do you think our posts aren't showing up if we use other news
> servers that host NI forums?

Indeed; but I did drill down in NI's website to the forums area and
found
that my recent Usenet posts to 'comp.lang.labview' are reflected in the
labview->genera
l (IIRC) forum, although my posts from years past don't
seem to be archived there. Posts made in this forum don't seem to get
properly threaded when propagated to the larger Usenet.

I would like to see either a new hierarchy ala the Novell
private forums which are archived in their entirety on 'Google Groups'
(Dejanews) and a separation of 'comp.lang.labview' entirely from
the private forums.

Michael Grigoni
Cybertheque Museum

[Kermitthefrog]

Hi Michael,
Almost all of our discussion forums map to a NNTP newsgroup. The exceptions to this are the NI Elvis forum and the Feedback on Developer Exchange forum. Kevin mentioned connecting to our news server - newsgroups.ni.com. There are actually 47 newsgroups on this server, 2 of which are not English.

Currently, our synch script runs every 30 minutes, and synchs all posts from our NNTP server (newsgroups.ni.com) with the discussion forum, and vice versa. If you are posting from a different news server, the post must first propogate back to the NI news server before it will appear in the discussion forum. Depending on the replication timeframe, the post may not show for awhile. I'd be happy to investigate a particular post to find out what happened.

In your later reply, you mention seeing your recent Usenet posts showing up in the forums, but not your older posts. When we started the forums in early 2001, we migrated the data from our news server. We believe that we migrated all data such that NNTP and the discussion forums started in synch. However, the user identification from these migrated posts doesn't always align properly. Again, if you have a specific post, I'd be happy to investigate to see what happened, its very important to us that the NNTP synch is working correctly.

You mention that the threading doesn't always match when we propogate back out to NNTP. We're working to improve that in a future release of the forums. Right now, the parent/child relationship in the posts occasionally gets lost, and we propogate the post back to NNTP as a parent. Our initial goal was to make sure we didn't lose the data, but we are working to better align the threads.

I'm interested in hearing more about the Novell private forums, can you point me to what you are looking at and explain more of the benefits? Our initial hierarchy was started by trying to keep in line with some of the naming conventions. Comp.lang.labview was actually our first forum, and it was started by a customer. It follows the traditional naming convention, then we switched to the natinst naming convention when we created the remainder of the forums.

I am currently working on the future of NNTP synching with the forums, and am really interested in any feedback you may have. Our research indicates that a significant number of our posts come from NNTP, and we definitely want to make sure these users are satisfied with the experience. I'd also be interested in knowing why you prefer posting through the newsgroups as opposed to through the forums. We're working on other enhancements to the forum, and I wonder if there is something we can address usability wise.

Regards,
Sarah

[rolfk]

Kevin Valentine wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> My listing shows 29 NI forums on newsgroups.natinst.com. I've posted
> using Verizon's news server in the past. They only listed
> comp.lang.labview and it took longer for my posts to show on the forum.
> That's why I switched to NI's server.
>
> I don't know all the finer details of how usenet works. I guess that
> people with dial-up or simply far away from the NI server would want to
> use a server that's closer to them.
>
> Perhaps you're on to something that the rest of with news readers should
> know. Do you think our posts aren't showing up if we use other news
> servers that host NI forums?

I used for some time the local news server of my ISP. This worked well
except that the news server did not sh
ow any posts with attachements.
This was probably a local setting of my ISPs news server to preserve
space. Also it was indeed delayd sometimes up to several hours.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Kevin Valentine]

On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 21:43:41 +0200, RolfK wrote:
> I used for some time the local news server of my ISP. This worked well
> except that the news server did not show any posts with attachements.

Hi Rolf,

Do you mean that you can see the post but there's no indication of an
attachment? Pan does this for the NI groups too. The files are
actually there, they're just not automatically decoded. If I see that
there are several hundred lines in the message, this usually indicates an
attachment which Pan can save. Not sure if it's the same case with
Mozilla.

-kevin

[rolfk]

Kevin Valentine wrote:

> Do you mean that you can see the post but there's no indication of an
> attachment? Pan does this for the NI groups too. The files are
> actually there, they're just not automatically decoded. If I see that
> there are several hundred lines in the message, this usually indicates an
> attachment which Pan can save. Not sure if it's the same case with
> Mozilla.

No my ISP simply skipped all posts which have an attachment. They don't
show up at all, nada, nix, niente. Makes sometimes for a rare
conversation in the flow of a thread. I used Mozilla with the ISP news
server as well as with the NI news server now and the difference
obviously was with my ISPs news server. On NIs news server I have no
problems se
eing posts with attachments nor the attachements itself.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[msg]

Sarah,

Thanks for your reply.


>
> I'm interested in hearing more about the Novell private forums, can
> you point me to what you are looking at and explain more of the
> benefits?

See nntp://support-forums.novell.com for the active file; these groups
reside only in the novell domain. 'comp.sys.novell' and the comp.netware
hierarchies are public on Usenet and not mirrored on the private hosts.

> I'd also be interested in knowing why you prefer posting
> through the newsgroups as opposed to through the forums.

I felt that 'comp.lang.labview' should be strictly a public Usenet
newsgroup, unrelated to any private forums (does it have a charter?).
I would also suggest asking Google (Dejanews) to archive the NI nntp
private groups as they do for Novell. Having
an independent public
newsgroup for NI issues and separate company support newsgroups works
well for Novell 🙂

As for accessing the forums, I prefer using a newsreader vs. a web
interface. Subscribing to the forum newsgroups using the NI host
is fine; getting message threading working will be better 🙂

Regards,

Michael Grigoni
Cybertheque Museum