Is this forum broken?

[Candace]

(Please email any advice)

Very Mysterious Problem:
It appears to me that all the MS Community Forums
are hopelessly malfunctioning, but I cannot find anyone
out there to corroborate this.

For the last 27 hours:
-The forums are running behind real-time, by 3-7 hours.
-I have tried posting 10 times, and only one post appeared.
-There are gaps of several hours where the forums show
no posts.
-The volume of posts appearing outside the gaps is below
normal.
-Nobody I've asked, out in cyberspace, has this problem.

-I live within 200 miles of Microsoft headquarters.
-I went to my local library 5 miles away, and the problem
was the same.
-I have both AOL and MSN, and both have the problem.
-Other forums I visit are 100% normal.

How could this be possible? Is the Internet "broken" with
respect to Portland, Oregon and the MS forums, but nothing
else?

Who at Microsoft could I report this to? The problem seems
to be much larger than my personal computing environment.

 

[dev]

Candace said:

(Please email any advice)

Very Mysterious Problem:
It appears to me that all the MS Community Forums
are hopelessly malfunctioning, but I cannot find anyone
out there to corroborate this.

For the last 27 hours:
-The forums are running behind real-time, by 3-7 hours.
-I have tried posting 10 times, and only one post appeared.
-There are gaps of several hours where the forums show
no posts.
-The volume of posts appearing outside the gaps is below
normal.
-Nobody I've asked, out in cyberspace, has this problem.

-I live within 200 miles of Microsoft headquarters.
-I went to my local library 5 miles away, and the problem
was the same.
-I have both AOL and MSN, and both have the problem.
-Other forums I visit are 100% normal.

How could this be possible? Is the Internet "broken" with
respect to Portland, Oregon and the MS forums, but nothing
else?

Who at Microsoft could I report this to? The problem seems
to be much larger than my personal computing environment.

Consider using a newsreader, such as Outlook Express, NetScape Messenger,
Forte Agent, etc. instead of the WEB interface, which is inferior - and
may be causing what you see.

 

[Jason Tsang]

Try using Outlook Express to access the newsgroups.

See here for a description on how to set up OE to access these newsgroups
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/outlookexpressnewreader.htm

 

[Rusty]

(Please email any advice)

Very Mysterious Problem:
It appears to me that all the MS Community Forums
are hopelessly malfunctioning, but I cannot find anyone
out there to corroborate this.

It appears to be the MS community forums, but as others have suggested,
you need to get access to a newsgroups server and configure Outlook
Express (or the news reader of your choice) to access that server and
then navigate the microsoft.public.* hierarchy

I checked http://groups.google.com and it has less of a delay: only
about 6 hours (last post was about 4:15, now it's 10:45) so there's
another alternate for you.

Since it appears you are on AOL, you may be able to access newsgroups
via keyword: newsgroups

here's an article on setting up AOL newsgroups:
http://computerhelp.mwsi.net/AOLSpecific/19AOLNewsgroups.htm

good luck!

 

[Candace]

Dev, Rusty, Steve and Jason:

Thank you all, retroactively. Your help is appreciated.

 

[Rob Schneider]

Dev, Rusty, Steve and Jason:

Thank you all, retroactively. Your help is appreciated.

For some reason, this "topic" of late and missing posts is cropping up
in a number of places, all without precision.

You have to remember that the usnet newsgroups are a distributed
application. Been this way for years and years. Read more at
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/

Postings on servers move all around the world to other servers all the
time. At any point in time all servers are never exactly the same as
others and sometimes there will be lags somewhere or another. The
"home" server for all this is of course msnews.microsoft.com, but
*copies* are all over the place all the time.

If you are unsatisfied with the timeliness of the server your are using,
e.g. the ISP's news server, your university's, Google's, your home news
server ... whatever ... contact the people who run that server ... or
use another server.