[giancarlostoro]

I have to mention, the D Programming language has forums that can be accessed both by a newsreader and from a web browser[1]. It is coded in a framework called Vibe.d[2] for the NNTP protocol and HTTP[3], which I think is fascinating. My only complaint is that due to the somewhat dying out of USENET for discussion reasons, and mostly it just being used for piracy (if you do a bit of research it's still just about as active as torrenting, except it's a lot more automated, used to use USENET, I rather stick to legal alternatives and avoid the paranoia), the old clients while they still work, could still use some touching up which probably wont happen.

I enjoy the idea that if all discussions in a support forum are on the NNTP protocol, I can archive them all, so I hardly have to open up a browser to search through years (decades?) of threads to see if anyone else has had the same issues as me. Imagine something like Stack Overflow all of a sudden at your finger tips without any internet access. It's a really nice thing, sometimes the internet just dies on you when you need it most.

As for IRC, people are willing to use it, if you put something useful on there (support for a project, or a community that people are interested in). If you want adoption from users who are just browsing the internet, maybe a web client / desktop client combination that makes IRC a lot less seamless to the average "I don't know" type of user.

[1]: http://forum.dlang.org/ [2]: http://vibed.org/ [3]: https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibenews

[fsiefken]

Yes a webforum with an NNTP gateway would be very nice. I remember vBulletin had some functionality like this and I hope Discourse will implement it. NNTP is very nice for archiving and it's distributed. Maybe we should do twitter and discussions over blockchains... when NNTP servers get out of vogue. There is a stackoverflow dump for local use by the way.