The article advises "Use NNTP".

NNTP is what the D Language forums use:

https://forum.dlang.org/

While it may look like any web forum, it is a shell around NNTP. This means you can access it via any NNTP software, like Thunderbird (what I use), by pointing to news.digitalmars.com

There's a readonly version of it that consists of simple HTML pages:

https://www.digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html

and even a mailing list you can sign up for. We've been very happy with it, been using it for 18 years. Occasionally people ask for "modern" forum software, but its restrictions are actually advantages.

Is the web ux shell open source?