Many years ago, I was participating in the C++ MFC newsgroups. I think the
MVPs there did nothing about fellow MVPs that were not nice. There was one
MVP in particular that was rude to me and a Microsoft person told him not to
do what he was doing.
A few years later, and still many years before now, I was participating in
the VB 6 forums. Some of those people were really rude, but Microsoft was
never involved. Since the newsgroups were sponsored by Microsoft about
Microsoft software, and since many of the problems were very likely
motivated by the desire for MVP status, I think Microsoft has been negligent
in ignoring the problems. I am not getting legal here, but I am stating my
opinions. I never was motivated by the possibility of MVP status, but I
think sometimes people are competitive by a desire for it. I have digressed
about that. The point I am getting at is that Microsoft has been for many
years ignoring the newsgroups.
The online interface to the newsgroups has been lousy. I hope it has been
improved or replaced; I assume it has. There is other software that was used
for the MSDN forums that was frustratingly buggy, buggy to the point that I
am surprised that Microsoft allowed the bugs to exist, since it gave
developers a low opinion of Microsoft's ability to create quality software.
The big bugs have been conquered and I hope Microsoft does not allow the big
ones, such as posts that get lost forever that sometimes required very much
time to write, to return. I assume they will be using that software for
other things.
The big advantage of the MSDN forums is that there is a lot of
representation from Microsoft in them. People are not rude. The Microsoft
people spend time giving credit to posts that are useful.
I am sure that this is not the only newsgroup that remains very useful, but
I also have the impression that there are not many Microsoft newsgroups that
are still as useful as this one is.
Regrettably, Microsoft announced today that they will begin phasing out
these public support newsgroups.
The announcement is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/default.mspx
A more unbiased article here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=6097&tag=nl.e539