Generic Word newsgroup?

[Paul]

I accessed the groups microsoft.public.word.general and
microsoft.public.word using Google Groups. Unfortunately, they no
longer carry those groups as live forums, just as archives. It is
very strange a forum for generic Word questions has so little activity
that this happened. What is the closest Word group for generic Word
questions?

Thanks.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I accessed the groups microsoft.public.word.general and
microsoft.public.word using Google Groups. Unfortunately, they no
longer carry those groups as live forums, just as archives. It is
very strange a forum for generic Word questions has so little activity
that this happened. What is the closest Word group for generic Word
questions?

Thanks.

This is it.

The archived groups were removed from the Microsoft news servers. Although
there are still some independent servers that support them, their traffic is
very low now.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Paul]

This is it.

The archived groups were removed from the Microsoft news servers. Although
there are still some independent servers that support them, their traffic is
very low now.

It's odd isn't it? There is a perfectly good ".general" subgroup for
Word, then a much less general ".docmanagement" alternative comes
along, presumably mushrooms in scope, then assumes the role of the
previous ".general". A bit like slang. New words become vogue, but
meaning similar things to old words, which drop out of usage.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Well, it's a long story. The problem with word.general was that it attracted
all the questions. People who were too lazy to figure out what their
question was really about would just post in .general. Eventually it got to
be unmanageable, so MS deprecated it, though it survived for quite a long
time (and may still survive, for all I know) on other news servers.

Then Microsoft created the Office Communities on the Web. It was decreed
that each product group had to have one NG for "General Questions." This is
where the Word MVPs sort of slipped up. No one was really sure what
word.docmanagement was supposed to be for, and in any case, it was a very
low-traffic NG, so we said, "If you *must* have one, take that one." So
word.docmanagement became Word General Questions in the Web portal, and now
it's the one with the unmanageable traffic, much to the confusion of users
like you who post via NNTP or Google Groups.