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Old May 5th 10, 08:36 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsme.general
Noel Paton[_3_]
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 229
Default NNTP Newsgroups closing

"98 Guy" wrote in message ...
Corday wrote:

On June 1, Microsoft will be progressively closing newsgroups


Yea - on their NNTP servers.

These microsoft.public groups are propagated world-wide. They will
continue to be propagated worldwide no matter what Microsoft does with
their own server.

Microsoft does not control these groups - nobody or no single server can
control a usenet newsgroup or a hirearchy of groups. A lot of people
don't realize or understand this fact.

Microsoft has already been removing newsgroups from their server. They
did it last year - and those groups still exist on the world-wide
usenet.



That's as may be - but the (vast?) majority of posts to these groups comes
directly through MS's servers, which means that when they pull the plug,
most of those people are not going to bother to find the few free NNTP
servers left, and will instead go to the forums. The traffic on the groups
will nose-dive, and they'll be left as a rump of their former selves. For
Legacy products,such as 9x, this will certainly be a death-knell - and since
Win7 contains no way to get to NNTP, we can assume that no new users will
come to the groups to solve problems on their older machines - they'll take
the path of least resistance and go to the forums instead.
Traffic to the MS groups has reportedly dropped by 50% over the past year -
no surprise, since MS has been directing people to the forums, rather than
the groups, and the 100 million early-adopters of Win 7 have no way to get
here anyway, without searching for (freebie) software, and then working out
WTF to do with it.
The rest of Usenet (of which strictly speaking, these groups are not part)
is also suffering a lingering death, except for those groups dealing in file
sharing and suchlike. MS's decision, while unwelcome, has been completely
predictable since the rise of the forum, and MS's decision to spend heavily
in that area while neglecting NNTP effectively made the move not just
inevitable, but imperative.

--
Noel Paton
CrashFixPC

Nil Carborundum Illegitemi
www.crashfixpc.co.uk