Forum and Newsgroups

[Neil Stevens]

Hi,

I am designing an internet forum in ASP.NET, what i have at present is a
forum that uses either and Access, MSSQL Server, or MySQL Server database
depending on how the forum is setup.

My question is simply this, can i use a newsgroup and display the messages
from a newsgroup on the forum.

Using this forum as an example, i would iterate through each of the
newsgroups available and display thos as groups: -

Group No
Of Posts
microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet 30
microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.announcements 40
etc...

Then when a user clicks on a group from the list the forum will display each
of the messages within the group, with each message displaying all the
posts/replies to that message, and so on.

Now, the reason for this is that i have a series of newsgroups and for
myself i would like to use the newsgroups i have as the data base for the
groups and forums that i will display in my forum, the database backend will
then be used for user accounts and other functional items.

So, if anyone knows if it is possible to achieve this using ASP.NET could
they please provide some sample code or some links to some sample on the
net.

Many thank in advance for your help

Regards
Neil

 

[Cowboy \(Gregory A. Beamer\)]

Can it be done? Certainly. You can look at SourceForge.com and see there are
NewsReader programs created. You would have to tweak the output to go to a
web front end, but that should be fairly simple. I would start there. Even
if you do not utilize the code, you can see how someone else conquers this
problem.

NOTE: www.gotdotnet.com (Microsoft's .NET site) has a new feature called
workspaces that is a lot like SourceForge. You might also want to check
there for a newsreader program.