and yet.... I've seen and ran webservers written entirely in php.

PHP has network socket capabilities, can be run outside of a webserver as a standalone scripted app - and with www.swig.org, arbitrary C/C++ libraries can easily be linked in to extend php.

However, my point wasn't against PHP (the source to which I have made some contributions) but all the various bulletin boards which are really discussion boards most of which seem to re-invent in the face of NNTP because few of the authors even know about it, or anything that cannot be shown in a web browser.

TWIG was a very good php webmail/nntp news reader; further it is possible to have an NNTP interface to most BB systems except to the degree that they allow editing of existing threaded posts.

My main grouch was the number of discussions I have an interest in that take place on these foul^H^H^H^Hless than ideal and well tried messaging systems when NNTP is much simpler to read; thank goodness for www.gmane.org that mirrors most mailing lists via NNTP and threaded web interface albeit without the pretty skins and fanciful markup language. It hurts to see 20 year old good systems badly re-written in html and javascript, but only because im contast it hurts to use them.

The tone of my comment makes me sound like William Caxton railing against the ignorant artists who make use of the printing press for ..... pictures!! ( don't know that he ever did rail against them, but I could probably do a pretty good impression)

Sam