<joke>
MS's announcement translated...
Starting in early summer 2010, Microsoft will begin progressively
closing down the Microsoft public newsgroups to enrich conversations in
the rapidly-growing forum platform. This decision is in response to
worldwide market trends and evolving customer needs.
Beginning this summer, we are shutting down perfectly working
standardized technology. This is to encourage the older more
knowledgeable crowd using those technologies to move into the web forums
where they may help users who are either to lazy or ignorant to install
news readers. Plus, in an effort to control all the content and postings
in our newsgroups we will create a proprietary interface that makes it
hard to replicate the information on 3rd party servers.
Microsoft continues to invest in forums to reduce customer effort,
consolidate community venues and make it easier for active contributors
to retain their influence. Forums provide a healthy community
environment with less spam and make answers easier to find by customers
and search engines. Additionally, forums offer a better user and
off-topic management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by
facilitating discussions in a clean space.
We assigned some programmers to consolidate all of our venues, and
create nntp/web forums bridging. Instead they wrote a new forum
interface. Since we paid them all this money, we have to use this new
technology or we won't look good to our bosses. To make it easier on us,
and offload some of the pain to the community we will be disabling some
of your connections and requiring you to go to some effort to setup some
new accounts.
</joke>
