[Added]You can post to it all you want also - it is going against Microsoft's Test Server so[/Added]
We’ll be launching the new build of Newsgroups soon. It’s currently up on our staging server and it would nice if anyone out there who has some time could play with it and try to break it. We’re looking for bugs, feature requests, and usability issues. This build is still far from our ultimate application, but it does have some nifty new features when compared to the old build.
The staging site lacks a lot of features, but you can still login and then navigate to the newsgroups.
http://64.85.8.19/sqljunkies/newsgroups/
Submit bugs here: http://dotnetjunkies.com/Forums/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=4933
You cannot use any of the personalization or posting features unless you’re logged in.
The application is in debug mode both in compilation and config so keep that in mind when it comes to performance!
Features
The front end of the application is pretty static. There are only a few database calls to get parent threads, ratings, and misc. user information such as email addresses need by other features listed below. Other than that everything is static. This is accomplished by a background thread that is timed so when the time expires it spins off, gets all newsgroups that need archiving, grabs all the posts, relates them to any existing posts, creates static pages, updates the search index (not yet implemented), looks for anyone who is set to be alerted when the message has been responded to, alerts them, and marks the post as status unchanged. The next feature I’m implementing is garbage cleanup where if a post has a really poor rating or no responses it will be removed from the database and any static files deleted after (n) amount of time. Then they are moved from the “Worker” table to an archive table because after a post is removed from the live news server technically a same message id can be used which obviously would cause issues. I feel confident launching without this feature in place yet because most news server only dump 1-4 times a year depending on traffic.
So please let me know how you like it, be harsh. Give suggestions on features. The runtime is pretty generic so adding additional features is pretty easy.