scott said:
I've been using outlook express version 6 (win xp) for years to read the
msnews.microsoft.com newsgroups. I recently noticed that only maybe 5% of
all of the available msnews.microsoft.com newsgroups will display in the
newsgroups dialog.
For example, there are no excel or access newsgroups even listed. Has
microsoft changed something? How can I read the missing
msnews.microsoft.com
newsgroups with outlook express 6?
Microsoft is scrambling away from Usenet. Microsoft is not Usenet but
just one node in the worldwide mesh network of NNTP servers. Despite
the departure of Microsoft, Usenet will continue to exist as will the
microsoft.public.* group; however, obviously you need to use a different
node in the Usenet network to get at those groups. Eventually you won't
even be able to connect to [ms]news.microsoft.com because they'll kill
that server.
NNTP is not an included server in the later versions of Windows Server
(Windows 2003 Server was the last server version of Windows that
included their NNTP server). Microsoft isn't going to support an OS or
any part of it that is no longer under support. The rest of us know
that software remains usable for years or even decades after support is
dead or even if its author/owner fades into oblivion. The NNTP protocol
has changed little (which means it's stable) with some extensions added
back in 2000 but stability isn't what is important to Microsoft.
Microsoft won't support newsgroups because they lost their own NNTP
server in a supported version of their own OS but God forbid they use
anyone else's NNTP server. It's not Microsoft owned so Microsoft can't
use it. And Microsoft still trying to convince users not to abandon
Microsoft with a claim that they're embracing open standards. Uh huh.
Microsoft had no effective control over the content of posts in the
microsoft.public.* groups because, well, it's Usenet and Usenet is an
anarchy. They could filter out posts submitted to their NNTP server or
peered to them from other NNTP servers but they could do absolutely
nothing about the content in those same newsgroups carried on all the
rest of Usenet. So Microsoft finds excuses to close a very cheap
communications venue for free peer support and instead pushes their
customers to inane web-based forums lacking a vast number of features
that have been common to newsreaders for over a decade.
Microsoft did give a glancing stab at providing an NNTP-to-webforum
gateway that runs locally on your host (instead on their server to which
you would connect your NNTP server) and there is also a better
"Community" version (somewhere on Sourceforge, I think) but if you try
either then it won't be long until you abandon that access method.
Trying to get articles updated through the NNTP-to-webforum gateway is
extremely slow. Microsoft's gateway (which itself proclaims that
Microsoft didn't write that program) screwed up the Message-ID header's
value hence the values listed in the References header which led to
threading problems in many if perhaps not all newsreaders. The
Community version of the gateway fixes that but the excrutianting slow
article retrieval will make you long for the days of 1200 baud dial-up
when downloading e-mail which was far more speedy. Plus, if you visit
their web-based forums for awhile, you start to realize that the minimal
intelligence needed to configure a newsreader automatically eliminated
some of the severest boobs that still show up in the forums.
Their forums are a mess. They don't even have features that are typical
in other web-based forums that usually employ phpBB or vBulletin. Yeah,
I know, those aren't Microsoft products either and why Microsoft will
refuse to use them.
