will this usenet group disappear too?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert Macy
  • Start date Start date
On Usenet, the groups may live on, but Microsoft's server msnews.microsoft.com
will be shut down on June 1st.
 
Robert, my understanding is that it is being replaced by:-

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/officeword

Hope the above helps.
Click to expand...

Thank you. Is there a URL to go to to find ALL abandoned
microsoft.public.xxxx sites?.

Frustratingly, upon clicking to go to that URL, my screen went from
this very efficient display containing 90% useful information to a
blank screen requiring a download of 1 minute (dial up link) to
produce a screen that has around 10% information. The rest of the
screen contains useless boxes, blank frames, prettiness with no
information, etc etc, and irrelevant words. Amazing, simply amazing.
Again, and in true tradition, someone was allowed to "improve" the
systems backwards!
 
Thank you. Is there a URL to go to to find ALL abandoned
microsoft.public.xxxx sites?.

The are ALL going away. Every last one of them.
 
Almost certainly the newsgroups will live on. What is changing is the link
to Microsoft's help forums, which (like many other similar web forums) have
been interfaced with the MS News server so what appears in one medium should
also appear in another. In future that link will be broken and the help
forums will change. NNTP access will then only be available to the new
Microsoft Answers forum via the NNTP Bridge. A new bridge for that purpose
was supposed to be available yesterday, but so far I see no sign of it at
http://connect.microsoft.com/MicrosoftForums/

Because of the way newsgroups are peered in Usenet, they will have a life of
their own even if/when Microsoft turns off their server. You will of course
need to find another text newsgroup server if you wish to continue using
them. There are plenty out there to choose from. Your ISP may provide a news
feed and that would be the first place to look. After that you need to look
for free text based news servers. They should also continue to be available
via Google Groups.

Inevitably as Microsoft steers its users elsewhere for their help, traffic
levels on the newsgroups will fall, and moderation may go out of the window
as Microsoft will not be spam filtering :(

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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OK the link to the new bridge is now working - which is more than can be
said for the bridge. Let's hope it is sorted out over the weekend :(

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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The problems with the 'new bridge' will be exactly the same as with the old
one. The only changes are that the port is now configurable and that it
connects to the same service on a different server. Basically they split the
load and that's it. I guess the upside is that there are now less other
forums/threads where your post might end up if it goes wrong again.

For the people who can't run the original NNTP bridge because they have
already running something on port 119, this implementation could be a
workaround. All they would have to do is copy the files from the new bridge
to another directory, and edit NntpBridge.exe.config. If they change the
ForumsWebServiceUrl to the old one, and set the NntpServerPort to something
they like, they are good to go.

Yves
 
My comments were addressed more towards the fact that the new bridge was
released to the public yesterday and it simply didn't work. It crashed every
time with a variety of error messages. There were howls of complaint in the
MVP private newsgroups yesterday from other MVPs around the world who were
having the same problems. This morning I haven't checked the bridge yet, but
at least it appears to have downloaded the message headers without error, so
the signs are a little more hopeful.

As for the port, some ISPs and some companies block port 119 to prevent
newsgroup access. Having a configurable port should get around that - but
for others port 119 should still work if the application is re-directed
there - even if other news-servers are using port 119. Most users can leave
the new bridge set with the default port of 120.

My understanding - though again I haven't checked as nothing was working
properly yesterday - is that the Answers forum access has been removed from
the old bridge. I don't know what the thinking behind that was as if you are
not registered with the other services - MSDN etc - , the old bridge should
not be able to post in them.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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I have now checked and the bridge problems of yesterday seem to have been
fixed.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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It was sorted out late last night (European time). Access via the previous
bridge ceased working when they started the upgrades.

Terry Farrell
 
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