[phs2501]

Personally I would like some way to navigate through the whole thread in some sort of reasonable order. My preference would be depth-first with the leaves sorted by the most recent post /in that subtree/. This matches how tools like newsreaders and Mutt will sort threads, and I believe how Gmane worked as well. (Though I will admit that for something like a web site that does not keep the state of whether posts are read or not, reordering leaves like that may be confusing. In a tool like Mutt it is useful behavior as when new posts come in they will naturally gravitate to the bottom [or top, depending on your sort order] of your message list).

In particular I'd like to be able to, starting with a particular post, repeatedly hit "next" and be assured that once I hit the next sibling post to the original I've read that entire subthread. Gmane let you do this just by whacking the space bar; if you weren't at the bottom of a post it would page down, if you were it would go to the next one.

In other words I'd like it to behave as much like a good NNTP newsreader as possible.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> like a good NNTP newsreader

That's lost technology from the golden age of our ancestors, who were so much greater than any of us now ;-)

[FullyFunctional]

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but because the format and transport were fixed, it enabled the creation of many clients, some of which had some incredible useful innovations.

Today this innovation has moved to the myriad of proprietary alternatives (like Slack or our very own HN) but they are closed worlds so not only can nobody create a new client, we also loose all the contents if the company dies (which isn't rare).

--grumpy greybeard

[chaotic_clanger]

it's not lost - it's just not in the spotlight due to these young person's webs.. facebook, twatter or whatever .)

there is plenty of active usenet groups, comp.arch being one of the best places where the greybeards meet.