On Mon, 6 Sep 2010 21:17:08 -0700, "W****n S."
<Thisisnotreal@guess.com> wrote:
>
>"VanguardLH" <V@nguard.LH> wrote in message
>news:i640tm$sbg$1@news.albasani.net...
>> scott wrote:
>>
>>> I've been using outlook express version 6 (win xp) for years to read the
>>> msnews.microsoft.com newsgroups. I recently noticed that only maybe 5% of
>>> all of the available msnews.microsoft.com newsgroups will display in the
>>> newsgroups dialog.
>>>
>>> For example, there are no excel or access newsgroups even listed. Has
>>> microsoft changed something? How can I read the missing
>>> msnews.microsoft.com
>>> newsgroups with outlook express 6?
>>
>> Microsoft is scrambling away from Usenet. Microsoft is not Usenet but
>> just one node in the worldwide mesh network of NNTP servers. Despite
>> the departure of Microsoft, Usenet will continue to exist as will the
>> microsoft.public.* group; however, obviously you need to use a different
>> node in the Usenet network to get at those groups. Eventually you won't
>> even be able to connect to [ms]news.microsoft.com because they'll kill
>> that server.
>>
>> NNTP is not an included server in the later versions of Windows Server
>> (Windows 2003 Server was the last server version of Windows that
>> included their NNTP server). Microsoft isn't going to support an OS or
>> any part of it that is no longer under support. The rest of us know
>> that software remains usable for years or even decades after support is
>> dead or even if its author/owner fades into oblivion. The NNTP protocol
>> has changed little (which means it's stable) with some extensions added
>> back in 2000 but stability isn't what is important to Microsoft.
>> Microsoft won't support newsgroups because they lost their own NNTP
>> server in a supported version of their own OS but God forbid they use
>> anyone else's NNTP server. It's not Microsoft owned so Microsoft can't
>> use it. And Microsoft still trying to convince users not to abandon
>> Microsoft with a claim that they're embracing open standards. Uh huh.
>>
>> Microsoft had no effective control over the content of posts in the
>> microsoft.public.* groups because, well, it's Usenet and Usenet is an
>> anarchy. They could filter out posts submitted to their NNTP server or
>> peered to them from other NNTP servers but they could do absolutely
>> nothing about the content in those same newsgroups carried on all the
>> rest of Usenet. So Microsoft finds excuses to close a very cheap
>> communications venue for free peer support and instead pushes their
>> customers to inane web-based forums lacking a vast number of features
>> that have been common to newsreaders for over a decade.
>>
>> Microsoft did give a glancing stab at providing an NNTP-to-webforum
>> gateway that runs locally on your host (instead on their server to which
>> you would connect your NNTP server) and there is also a better
>> "Community" version (somewhere on Sourceforge, I think) but if you try
>> either then it won't be long until you abandon that access method.
>> Trying to get articles updated through the NNTP-to-webforum gateway is
>> extremely slow. Microsoft's gateway (which itself proclaims that
>> Microsoft didn't write that program) screwed up the Message-ID header's
>> value hence the values listed in the References header which led to
>> threading problems in many if perhaps not all newsreaders. The
>> Community version of the gateway fixes that but the excrutianting slow
>> article retrieval will make you long for the days of 1200 baud dial-up
>> when downloading e-mail which was far more speedy. Plus, if you visit
>> their web-based forums for awhile, you start to realize that the minimal
>> intelligence needed to configure a newsreader automatically eliminated
>> some of the severest boobs that still show up in the forums.
>>
>> Their forums are a mess. They don't even have features that are typical
>> in other web-based forums that usually employ phpBB or vBulletin. Yeah,
>> I know, those aren't Microsoft products either and why Microsoft will
>> refuse to use them.
>
>Well put.
Yes it was.
>
>Web based forums are just a plain pain in the arse.
Yes they are.
BTW, mozilla may not broadcast its newsgroups, or whatever it's called
to let other servers carry them. But mozzilla has 45 mozilla
newsgroups , related to firefox, Netscape, Thunderbird and maybe other
stuff, on its own news server, news.mozilla.org iirc. Many/most
computer programs to read news allow one to use more than one news
server at the same time, so you do have to put in another entry for
servers, but there's no charge, and the ARE newsgroups, with all the
advantages of newsgroups. Although there are 45 ngs, 3 of them will
get most of the business.)
>Thanks Micro$oft.
UGH.