Strange results in discussion groups

[mtvet]

Hi-

Couldn't find an appropriate place to post this, but thought this might be a
good first place. I seem to be getting very inconsistent results when I'm
accessing the Microsoft Discussion Groups. I do a search on a keyword, and
occasionally the thread I'm looking for appears in the list, occasionally it
doesn't.

When it does appear, and I click on it, occasionally it say's something
along the lines of 'community message not available'. It will then not
recognize it if I try to load that thread again. I click on it once, and it
reverts to the '+' sign. I click again, and it does nothing. If I then
re-search it often will not find that thread. Other times, I click on the
thread and it does expand and I can actually see what's going on in the
discussion.

Any idea what's going on with this interface? Do other people have this
problem, or is it something in my settings??

Mark

 

[Daave]

Hi-

Couldn't find an appropriate place to post this, but thought this
might be a
good first place. I seem to be getting very inconsistent results when
I'm
accessing the Microsoft Discussion Groups. I do a search on a
keyword, and
occasionally the thread I'm looking for appears in the list,
occasionally it
doesn't.

When it does appear, and I click on it, occasionally it say's
something
along the lines of 'community message not available'. It will then
not
recognize it if I try to load that thread again. I click on it once,
and it
reverts to the '+' sign. I click again, and it does nothing. If I
then
re-search it often will not find that thread. Other times, I click on
the
thread and it does expand and I can actually see what's going on in
the
discussion.

Any idea what's going on with this interface? Do other people have
this
problem, or is it something in my settings??

Microsoft's Web interface *always* has problems. It is best to avoid it
altogether.

Instead, use a news client to access these newsgroups. You already have
one (Outlook Express). Clicking on this link should take you to the
General group:

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

You may press Ctrl + H to see all threads in that newsgroup that you
have been participating in.

More info:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/outlookexpressnewreader.htm

http://www.insideoe.com/resources/communities.htm

There are many other news readers beside Outlook Express. You might want
to eventually try one of the following:

Agent
Xnews
40tude

Good luck.

P.S. If you want to search through archived posts, Google is the way to
go:

http://groups.google.com/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general/topics?hl=en&lnk

More on Usenet:
http://www.faqs.org/usenet/index.html

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

Most likely due to the extreme weather conditions in the Pacific Northwest
(cf. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/393514_storm25.html) and the
"skeleton" crews typical of a long holiday weekend, there have been server
problems (when accessing the newsgroups via the web-interface) since the
morning of the 23rd.

NNTP access to the newsgroups has not been affected.

Accessing the MS newsgroups in Outlook Express Newsreader
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/newsgroupsetup.mspx

Setting up Outlook Express to access Microsoft newsgroups
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/outlookexpressnewreader.htm

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Hi-

Couldn't find an appropriate place to post this, but thought this might be a
good first place. I seem to be getting very inconsistent results when I'm
accessing the Microsoft Discussion Groups. I do a search on a keyword, and
occasionally the thread I'm looking for appears in the list, occasionally it
doesn't.

When it does appear, and I click on it, occasionally it say's something
along the lines of 'community message not available'. It will then not
recognize it if I try to load that thread again. I click on it once, and it
reverts to the '+' sign. I click again, and it does nothing. If I then
re-search it often will not find that thread. Other times, I click on the
thread and it does expand and I can actually see what's going on in the
discussion.

Any idea what's going on with this interface? Do other people have this
problem, or is it something in my settings??

The reason you're having such problems is that you are using the awful
web interface to read this newsgroup--it's the slowest, clunkiest,
most error-prone method there is. Do yourself a favor and switch to a
newsreader, such as Outlook Express, which comes with Windows XP, or
Windows Mail, which comes with Vista. See
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/outlookexpressnewreader.htm

 

[Milt]

Mark,

You're not alone in having problems with the Windows web based
Newsreader. I'm having similar problems. It began acting strangely Dec. 23
here. Sometimes I get messages up to only Dec. 23 and sometimes I see
headers thru Dec. 26. And the headers since Dec. 23 say "content
unavailable". So the problem seems to be with Microsoft, not us.

And, while I don't like to contradict the comments of others who have
answered you, I find that I prefer using the web based reader rather than
the Outlook Newsreader interface. I find that it has almost always worked
reliably for me. And I think it's more convenient to use than the
Newsreader, at least for my purposes. The only real advantage I see while
using Outlook's newsreader is that there's a spell checker in it.

Folks here, who's opinions I greatly respect, say the Newsreader is
much better. But I sometimes use it for a week or two, and always go back to
the web browser interface. I guess, as the cowboys used to say, "there's an
ass for every saddle".

Milt

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

...I prefer using the web based reader rather than

the Outlook Newsreader interface. I find that it has almost always worked
reliably for me.

NNTP access to these newsgroups has not been affected since the web-based
access went haywire on the 23rd. So much for the reliability of web-based
access.

 

[PCBlues]

Hi-

Couldn't find an appropriate place to post this, but thought this might be a
good first place. I seem to be getting very inconsistent results when I'm
accessing the Microsoft Discussion Groups. I do a search on a keyword, and
occasionally the thread I'm looking for appears in the list, occasionally it
doesn't.

When it does appear, and I click on it, occasionally it say's something
along the lines of 'community message not available'. It will then not
recognize it if I try to load that thread again. I click on it once, and it
reverts to the '+' sign. I click again, and it does nothing. If I then
re-search it often will not find that thread. Other times, I click on the
thread and it does expand and I can actually see what's going on in the
discussion.

Any idea what's going on with this interface? Do other people have this
problem, or is it something in my settings??

Mark

I posted a new thread last night to get help with my laptop mouse and am
having just as much trouble finding my thread in order to respond to peoples
suggestions. I've actually only any post from 12/28 to come up once today,
all other are from 12/26 and before!

 

[mtvet]

You would think that since you can only rate answers, etc, using the
web-based access that Microsoft would want to actually fix the problems with
the interface so that it wasn't so user UN-friendly. I've never had a search
engine give me such varied results with successive searches on the same
thing. Seems repeatable enough that it should be a piece of cake to debug,
don't you think???

The other thing that's very inconsistent is having the "reply" box actually
include the subject and text of the message you're replying to. More often
than not it comes up with a blank subject and message, and you're stuck
either trying to copy/paste, or close and re-reply hoping for a different
result.

Some have suggested that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again expecting different results. These people clearly have
not used this interface.