Re: Where is everyone going now?
"David Wilkinson" wrote:
You don't need usenet access from your ISP in order to access
NNTP. For the Microsoft newsgroups in particular, it is much
better to access msnews.microsoft.com directly.
Yes, and that how I access MS news groups. Moreover, Microsoft
[Live] Mail in Vista and Windows 7 ships with "Microsoft
Communities" account predefined in the product. So, basically
average user should make almost no efforts to access MS news
groups.
I don't know what is the situation with NNTP support in USA, but
it seems that since those preposterous accusations last year that
Usenet helps to spread child pornography ISP's are reluctant to
provide any support whatsoever. I can see a sudden drop in traffic
in once most crowded groups.
[...] they encourage everybody to switch to web-based forums
(which are quite horrible, IMHO).
This is sadly true, though they are improving slowly.
Too slowly. For example, since MSDN forums era until this very day
they cannot figure out their fonts. Avoiding rich text editor and
providing basic markup tags (as many forums have been doing since
90's) would produce better results than the pure eye pain that
every second post is.
I like to participate in programming communities. Sadly, MS
communities are not quite attractive. Maybe StackOverflow.com will
pick up the fallen flag, I am not sure.
Alex