What's with all of the Case Solution and Test Bank nonsense posts?

[Michael Torrie]

On 07/10/2017 02:06 PM, Pete Forman wrote:
>> What's the meaning of "https news service" then? If it's netnews, it's
>> NNTP, not HTTP. If it just happens to be a web app that carries
>> information from a newsgroup, then that's not a news service, it's a
>> web forum, and there's no such thing as a generic web forum API.
> 
> RFC 4642 (updated by RFC 8143) describes the use of TLS with NNTP. It
> enhances the connection between NNTP client and server, primarily with
> encryption but optionally with other benefits.

Again, that is not HTTPS. Don't confuse port number with protocol!

As Chris says, Google Groups is essentially a web forum that happens to
mirror Usenet content.  It's not a news service itself (no NNTP), not an
NNTP server.  So if GG is causing users problems, the solution is to
ditch it and use something better, like a standalone NNTP client and a
real Usenet server.  Or python-list via email.

I wish there was a decent (free) API that everyone used for web forums
that would let me use a decent, threaded news reader to browse forums.
I once wrote a forum scraper using BeautifulSoup that downloaded posts,
along with graphics and made them into MIME messages served over NNTP
(using Twisted) to my NNTP client.  So much information is lost in web
forums (there's no threading in web forums) that it didn't work out that
well.