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Comment by manish_gill | Hacker News Reader

This might be fairly simple, but I can't find a good solution - A replacement for Google Groups.

More specifically, a better UI to use Mailing Lists. Perhaps like vBulletin or other advance forum software. Maybe even built-in support in my email client?

For the life of me, I can't find a good way to use Mailing Lists. I don't like receiving 40+ messages every day, but I don't find digest mode good enough either. Google Groups is clunky, and it gives me no good motivation to return to it. The readability is also not all that great imo. The whole ajaxy thing it has going for it is also bad. I want to read static text on a functional and beautiful UI. It's not too much to ask for. :(

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Fully agree with you on the clunkiness of Google Groups. Thing is, most other mailing list web interfaces are even worse; not only are they lacking a threaded discussion view like we enjoy here on HN, they often only show one message at a time. And then there's web forum software like vBulletin. Don't even get me started...the pagination...the horror.

It's awful! And I agree with the other commenters that it used to be better. Usenet was better. A threaded mail client is better. HN is better. Reddit is better!

This got me thinking: why don't folks just deploy a reddit instance? It's open source, it's easy to hack, it works. I went ahead and did it myself. As a test, I wrote a little gateway program to import all the postings from that famous old Usenet dump [1], the one Google was so excited to preserve for us in clunky old Google Groups.

This Usenet-in-reddit experiment is surprisingly readable. Some of the formatting tricks and conventions from 30 years ago carried over without needing conversion. However, some things still need cleaning up before this is ready to be shown to the world.

If you're interested in helping out, it's a fun little project. Drop me a line!

[1] http://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/

In my opinion, discussions were handled better in the old Usenet days. How about running a private NNTP server and use one of the programs that forwards the mailing list to the NNTP server? There are still lots of good NNTP clients out there like XNews

I can't agree more and what I absolutely loved about Usenet discussions was, every reply contains a subject line. And it was expected etiquette to change your subject line if your reply deviates from the parent.

With usenet, I could easily tell what I haven't read and if a branch deviates from what I'm interested in discussing, I can just ignore that entire branch.

I used and loved XNews, and Pan, and SLRN.

Setting up a private NNTP server and getting people to use a Usenet client is going to be a challenge. I haven't looked, but are there any mobile clients?

I find this problem interesting, and I'm not sure what the right way to start solving would be. Is it that you like mailing lists and hate their web interfaces, or you like a forum/bulletin board style system and hate the way it notifies you of new content? I think each has a different solution, I'm just not sure what it is.

I think what I'd want is a forum that emails, but runs so completely off email that you don't have to log in if you so choose -- essentially, a hook on message save to email out if the preference is on, and a smart enough parser on receiving an email to post back to the forum (after email validation and verification, of course). That would be really fun to build, and may be worth some time exploring. If that's a solution you'd like, let me know - I could always use a hacking buddy.

Something like DFeed?

Example: http://forum.dlang.org/ Source: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Huh, this actually looks nice!

Have you tried Discourse? It's Jeff Atwood's open source forum software.

I glanced at it when it made some news. I have the same problem with Discourse - unnecessary javascript just to view static text on the web.

Threadable (YC W14) is working on the mailing list problem. http://threadable.com/

They have a walkthrough video here. http://vimeo.com/90926057 Stay with it till the end; it looks like any other forum software until it becomes clear it's all happening over email, without any need for your team to learn a new tool or sign into anything. You can split off new discussions at any time, or make any sublist digest-only.

I like Gmane's interface. Many mailing lists are mirrored over at Gmane, and its "frames and threads" interface gives a nice email client feel.

I'm currently working on a Google groups/Google plus alternative for communicating and sharing information between one another. It's very early beta stages at the moment but maybe worth you checking out https://honbu.io

Take a peek at http://groupbuzz.com , developed by one of my students for just that problem. Its best use case is for paid communities of one kind or another.

If you have the time to help build it, there's one being built here co-op style: https://assemblymade.com/party-box

try codio.io or codio.com, cant remeber url

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