cball@ishmael (09/06/88)
Since no one else has mentioned it, there is a system that keeps "news" in a database. It is called notes. Notes is an independant development that was derived from the PLATO system originated by CDC. Notes was written by Ray Essick at the University of Illinois. The latest full release I've seen was 1.7 and was released in early 1985. Rich Saltz distributed some changes to support moderated notesfiles around 1986 when he worked for Mirror Systems. I've heard very little about it recently. The notes user interface is somewhat different from news. The major benefit to notes is that it organizes articles in "notestrings". Each string consists of an original article(note) and its responses. This feature makes it easy to either ignore or closely follow a discussion. This combined with access control mechanisms makes notes superior for internal corporate project communication. The biggest loss is that cross-postings cannot be maintained as simple links, the entire article must be stored in each topic's database. Notes also has apparently not been in active development recently, so it doesn't support features such as similar to news' kill lists, nntp, etc. There are other differences, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with news to elaborate much further. The major point is that if you want to store news articles in a database format, you should start with notes or at the least take a careful look at it before re-engineering news. Personally, I'd rather see the notes user interface ported to news than the reverse. Charles Ball cball@inmet