[Pan-users] Re: Re: Several features request

[Duncan]

Michael M. posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,
on Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:23:29 -0500:

> I have been wondering (as I lurk) why more people who want to use
> multiple servers don't use something like Hamster, leafnode or Newsplex
> in conjunction with Pan? [] IMO it just can't beat the convenience of a
> local proxy server (of the sort that the aforementioned software
> provides).  I like having all my groups from all of my servers visible
> at once and I haven't found a newsreader that provides that.  Maybe
> there's some downside to these programs that I'm not aware of?

I think the biggest downside is just that it IS extra software that one
must master, and depending on how it's set up, will likely require more
disk space and bandwidth as well, due to the lower level of filtering one
could tolerate (often just grabbing the entire group, minus obviously
filterable spam, of course) at that level, or risk filtering out content
one might be interested in.

It'd work well for text groups and those binary groups where perhaps 80%
of the content is desired anyway, but for groups where <20% of the content
is desired, where there's no effective way to know /which/ 20% without
actually eyeballing at least 50% of the overviews, the additional
bandwidth and storage costs might be too high to be practical for many.
(That's ignoring leafnode's overview only, cache body on request,
functionality, but there again, that's getting into configuration details
many will believe is to complex to deal with, likely putting them off from
even trying, or making it one of those things they are always "going" to
look into, but never get around to actually doing it.)

It's simply easier to have a news client, which one needs anyway and must
therefore learn how to configure, handle it all, rather than hassling BOTH
the client and the server.

Parallel to why so few run their own mail server, even tho they could get
fancier with spam filters and local cron mail and the like, because it's
just simpler to run only a mail client.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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