Posts by David-W-Fenton

Microsoft kills off newsgroups

You don't need to use MS's site to post to their Usenet groups

I have never once even signed up for MS's discussion forums, but I post to them on a daily basis. You don't have to use MS's news server -- most news servers carry the MS groups (including older ones that MS has discontinued on its own server). After MS shuts down its own NNTP server, those microsoft.public newsgroups will continue to exist on other news servers and will likely get plenty of activity.

Only MS-operated groups?

The microsoft.public newsgroups are propagated to newsservers worldwide. MS doesn't control the content on any newsservers except the one it operates itself, msnews.microsoft.com.

The microsoft.public newsgroups are great resources for a large number of MS products. If you don't use them, then you'd likely not know that they are so good. But they aren't good because of MS, but because of the volunteers who spend the time posting there (of whom I'm one).