What On Earth M$

On 20 Dec 2011 19:03:52 GMT, Jack wrote:

What on earth is happening to the Microsoft newsgroups? The spam is unreal.
It's too much..

Microsoft dropped all support for the newsgroups over a year ago, in favor of
web-based forums (see below). Because of the way Usenet newsgroups propagate
from one server to another, it's impossible to kill off the groups; even
though they're no longer on Microsoft's news server they're on thousands of
other news servers all over the world, and very few ISP's honor "group
cancels", for good reason (they used to be WAY too easy to forge).

Traffic (legitimate traffic anyway) is way, way down because Microsoft no
longer links to the groups from the program Help; most of the MVPs and other
volunteers have left for other forums, or quit volunteering support
altogether.

Microsoft's replacements for these newsgroups:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Fo...accessdev/
http://social.answers.microsoft.com...US/addbuz/
and see also http://www.utteraccess.com


John W. Vinson JVinson *at* Wysard Of Info *dot* com