yeti Meanwhile I wrote about the "How have rabbits in a newsgroup?" question in that group:
From: yeti <yeti@tilde.institute>
Subject: Re: THE UNSORTED TESTS THREAD - @pfr ;-)
Newsgroups: alt.unitedbsd
Date: Sat, 21 May 2022 13:39:52 +0000
Organization: RetroBSD Net
I started to mention rabbits here because somewhere[1] else I was
wondering about how a newsgroup could have rabbits too. The 1st try
here in news was by using two or three unicode symbols (see below),
perhaps in a post before the restart, and that probably passed mainly
unnoticed.
U+1F407 ... Rabbit ... 🐇
U+1F430 ... Rabbit Face Emoji ... 🐰
U+1F573 ... Hole ... 🕳
U+1F46F ... Woman with Bunny Ears ... 👯
The hole is not exclusively called rabbit hole but it fits the context,
and I somewhat dislike the bunny-ear-ified women emoji (here they are
two despite the emoji being named "womAn with bunny ears") just found
today when looking up the symbols and their numeric values again.
Unicode doesn't fit news well, as some readers might still read them in
plain ASCII.
Then I thought about ASCII art rabbits but without finding a nice small
representation and the automagic conversion of screenshots of the
bunnies in use in the forum is far too big even if scaled down and
braille symbols are Unicode again.
The "But, but, but news isn't interactive enough for a rabbit hunt!"
problem could be solvable:
1. By replying into an "I've seen a rabbit!"-thread with the message-ID
and the 1st reply per message-ID would score.
2. By reporting rabbit sightings to a mail account managing the scores
table might be similarily easy and only the 1st sighting would be
reported by that mail-bot into the rankings thread, so hunting would
be less noisy in the newsgroup than in alternative (1).
3. By some scripts on the news server more automagisms would be
possible, e.g. boiling down the report thread to only keeping a table
and evaporating late replies. So again less noise in the group.
The braille bunny experiments probably will wrap it up for me, but it
was nice to think about this and maybe some day I'll install my 2nd
newsserver and play with some news-server-side-scripts.
My 1st newsserver ran in the 90s being fed with messages from Usenet and
FidoNet and because FidoNet->UnixNews conversion was a pain and FidoNet
insisted on realnames and usenet prefered not to use them I only was
tolerated in Fido using a nick instead of a realname and that was the
final bullet for the idea to join FidoNet and UnixNews for me. Things
might have changed since then, but if we somewhen want something like
FidoNet leaf systems again, we better should build them as nntp(-leaf)
systems.
This only quotes the "how implement a rabbit hunt in a newsgroup" related part of the post.
