Either way, you're proposing rewriting a large chunk of software -- several thousand or tens of thousands of lines of C -- in JavaScript, a radically different language. There's also the question of JavaScript's suitability for low-level TCP/IP communication as opposed to high-level HTTP-mediated message passing, and the question of what kind of server to run at the other end.
Certainly web forum designers ought to be beaten with a dead haddock until they study NNTP and NNTP newsreaders exhaustively before they reinvent the wheel. But the real solution ought to be something NNTP-sever-like (but more spam-resistant) running on the server, and talking to a browser-hosted JavaScript app via AJAX; an app using HTML 5's local file storage/database extensions to store killfile/scorefile information locally, and so on.
But that's an enormous job.
In fact, if I was looking for a business start-up, I'd be drawing schemas on the back of a napkin and looking for angel investors. Because you're looking at more than one programmer-year of work to do it right.
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Certainly web forum designers ought to be beaten with a dead haddock until they study NNTP and NNTP newsreaders exhaustively before they reinvent the wheel. But the real solution ought to be something NNTP-sever-like (but more spam-resistant) running on the server, and talking to a browser-hosted JavaScript app via AJAX; an app using HTML 5's local file storage/database extensions to store killfile/scorefile information locally, and so on.
But that's an enormous job.
In fact, if I was looking for a business start-up, I'd be drawing schemas on the back of a napkin and looking for angel investors. Because you're looking at more than one programmer-year of work to do it right.