While BE Communities offers much more content than Usenet, I find the Forums are far less convenient for accessing and monitoring content of interest. A newsreader allows us to quickly browse the content of forums by picking a forum in the list and seeing the posts list in a seperate window for immediate review. Any flagged topics are highlighted and easy to isolate and review. Reading the threads under a topic are easier to review since replies to a particular comment can be placed under the comment in the comments tree. While I don't expect we will return to Usenet, at least it would be helpful if some of it's advantages could be implemented here.
A couple of suggestions I would like to see implemented are:
1) A forums browser with list of content like a News Reader. Currently we have to jump into a web page to view the posts to a forum and back out to access a different forum. This results in lots of waiting for pages to reload. Content is much less accessible.
2) The ability to tag topics of interest and be able to filter them and have them highlighted when browsing posts. I am aware of the ability to list topics I have posted to but the list does not include topics I want to follow even though I made no comments. Email subscription to a forum results in constant emails which become a distraction and a nuisance. Subscribing to individual threads is cumbersome since we have to access email to see if any topics have been updated.
Thanks for the feedback. We are looking into making the Web interface "mimic" some things that newsreaders provide (at least for the Forums), some are in current releases of the software that is being used for Be Communities and some can be implemented, but since there are differences in the way that NNTP clients and Web browsers work, there are some things that you can do with one that you cannot do with the other. That said, there are other technologies that the site supports (especially RSS) that provide similar capabilities as what a "newsreader" can, it is just in a different implementation. .