How to access the official SoftVelocity newsgroups?

The SoftVelocity website is a little light on details about this but the Newsgroups are one of the primary places Clarion related stuff. http://www.softvelocity.com/Community/discussion_boards.htm [^1]

If you have purchased a license for Clarion then you should have detail on how to access the newsgroups along with your license.

To access the newsgroups

Configure your NNTP news reader to point at: discuss.softvelocity.com
You can also access the news from a web browser - http://discuss.softvelocity.com:8132/

Note: There are public and private groups. Contact Softvelocity to find out your username or try the Clarion6 serial number if you have one.

[^1] The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

2 Likes

Of course the web client for the NG is a pain and accessing from phones/tablets is pretty ugly. Then there is the thing with “what the heck is NNTP” ?? Personally I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit of that traffic moved over to here. I have looked at an NNTP bridge for discourse but I don’t think it will be happening (and probably not very useful).

I use Forte Agent for reading NG. But when I run it I always think that I am back in the years 80/90. Why is this app like this ? Never tried other software for this. Maybe install an emailclient that can do this ?

My newsgroup client of choice is [NewsmanPro][1]. It is nothing fancy but I really like that is has an option for MSSQL backend. Super fast searching!

Perhaps others could add their NG client preference here?

Edit: NewsmanPro is dead now :cry:
[1]: http://www.newsmanpro.com/

BTW, I have now written up more details on NewsmanPro:

I’ve been avoiding the Newsgroups for a long time.
I find them to be a horrible way to communicate.
There’s all of this quoting of previous posts, which makes it hard to see what’s new
If you don’t install a desktop client, then your stuck with dbabble, which seems to be some exercise in how to create the worst possible user interface.
If you do have a desktop client, then you have to have your own private cache of downloaded messages, in order to perform a search.
You can’t then send a link to someone else for a given message or thread …

**

Seriously SV, can we please move on to a newer technology.

**

1 Like

Not to mention the amount of spam I get to an email address only ever used on the SV Newsgroups. Gah!

Before you configure your NewsReader, you have to join the NewsGroup via
http://discuss.softvelocity.com:8132/
as a sort of registration.

The username and login is the numeric part of your Clarion 6 serial number.

Once you have entered the NG with your Webbrowser, you change your Password!

You do this in the menu, bottom left: User.Details.

Now that you have a new password, you can configure your favourite Newsreader to access the NG for you.

1 Like

NNTP is dead (or should be put out of it’s misery)
When reading Newsgroup posting, I only see text formatting, no bold even
I often see posts with the previous pasted in for context, making it harder to see what the new content might be
I can only view one post at a time, so I have to navigate in and out of posts, vs. just scrolling down.

Indeed!

Playing devils advocate though, what are the advantages of NNTP?
(taking a few ideas from that SO link above)

  • Offline access

One main advantage is that you can view offline. Depending where you are the stability of internet connectivity can still be an issue and being able to access an archive of information offline could be helpful. You still can’t interact though and that is a lot of the point of a discussion.

  • Identity management

NNTP allowed you to have one login to view and post to as many newsgroups as you wanted. Web based forums are no where near as interconnected so you find yourself having a different login for each. Is this a concern? Personally no and things like OAuth2, twitter, google, whatever logins also reduce the friction.

  • Distributed

NNTP/Usenet was supposed to distribute postings across servers right? Helps with making sure you don’t lose posts and things like that. Not sure how that worked for censoring post but it is a moot point when you are dealing with a private NNTP server anyway.

Any others? I wrote more but the I realised I was starting to list all the crap things about NNTP which was the opposite of what I said I would be doing :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Amen!

If I have a non-nettalk query or thought, it’s frustrating to go looking through the newsgroups. There is a lot of info there, absolutely … Just would like the interface to be “betterer”.

Yes, I installed NewsmanPro -

Mozilla Thunderbird has a very nice NNTP client.

Except it doesn’t necessarily show replies correctly. They’re often shown as responding to the original post, not the one you actually replied to. But ignoring that it works OK

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Hi Mark,
This is an old post from 7 months ago. Do you have any update on your thoughts?
I’m using Windows Live Mail for my newsreader client. It can create posts in Rich Text, but it will post it in Plain Text with an attachment having the Rich Text. It’s doable, but messy.
I can view the selected post in a separate column when scrolling, so I don’t have to navigate in and out.
I agree that the quoting of previous posts is a bit irritating.

I was using Windows Live Mail forever, but alas it has died on my machine, and no amount of installing or uninstalling will bring it back. So I’ve switched to Thunderbird.

There is the issue of threading - basically replies are not attached to the message you are replying to - which is a bummer.

and for some reason, out the box, Thunderbird is almost unusably ugly. It’s almost like an exercise in how to make an ugly app. Fortunately I discovered it supports themes, and so I’m using one called 'Phoenity Icons" which basically makes it look not-terrible.

1 Like

I can recommend XanaNews.
It’s a bit old but it works perfectly for my needs. Easy to search, easy to navigate topics and generally very easy to use.