Further Development

As with any system maintenance, bug fixes and improvements to the existing system are important to ensure that the project does not become stale. At present am I aware of no bugs that require attention, although undoubtedly there are some present.

Suggested improvements, fixes and enhancements
Here I shall detail several improvements which I believe would improve the system. In addition to the suggestions below I would also recommend implementation of the remaining enhancement ideas made earlier, “Minimum Requirements” and the focus group suggestions made earlier, “Further requirement suggestions”.

Word wrap: One of the most important enhancements that should be implemented is word wrapping when posting articles, following up to existing articles and viewing articles. This is related to common netiquette , as a user should always limit the line length of their articles to 80 characters to make for easier reading for other users of the system where their news reader does not support word wrapping of articles being read.

This is also the reason for including word wrapping for articles being read, as sometimes users post
articles to groups without realising that they are posting an article with long lines present.

Reply via e-mail & carbon-copy: The ability to reply to an article via e-mail and not have it posted to a public news group would undoubtedly be an improvement. Often users only need to reply to the individual asking a question or offering advice, and not the entire group. The carbon-copy feature is very similar in that multiple copies of the article are delivered to separate e-mail addresses.

Article sorting: As previously mentioned, being able to sort the articles in a group can be a very effective method for the user to find specific article(s). With the inclusion of threaded article lists however, may make the ability to sort articles useless without turning threading off.

Local article cache: At present the main drawback of the system is the time it takes to contact the NNTP server and receive a selection of articles is considerable. If the system were to store the received articles locally and update this cache with new articles as they are available the time to generate the pages and threading information would be cut down considerably.

Support for multiple languages: If the user can specify the language which they would like to view the system’s pages then the system can be used by considerably more people as the user is not limited to only the default language — English.