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From: nntp on 8 May 2010 03:50
What is Happening?
This message is to inform you that Microsoft will soon begin discontinuing
newsgroups and transitioning users to Microsoft forums.

Why?
As you may know, newsgroups have existed for many years now; however, the
traffic in the Microsoft newsgroups has been steadily decreasing for the
past several years while customers and participants are increasingly finding
solutions in the forums on Microsoft properties and third party sites. This
move will unify the customer experience, centralize content, make it easier
for active contributors to retain their influence, mitigate redundancies and
make the content easier to find by customers and search engines through
improved indexing. Additionally, forums offer a better user and spam
management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by encouraging a
healthy discussion in a clean community space. To this end, Microsoft will
begin to progressively shift available resources to the forums technology
and discontinue support for newsgroups.

In addition to offering a compelling online browser experience, for those
users who prefer to use an NNTP (newsgroup) reader to participate in the
newsgroups community, we have developed a solution called the NNTP Bridge
which allows a user to connect a variety of supported NNTP readers to the
forums they would like to participate in and continue having the NTTP reader
functionality. You can find instructions on how to download and set up the
NNTP Bridge here: http://connect.microsoft.com/MicrosoftForums/

Which Newsgroups Are Affected by this Shutdown?
All public newsgroups will eventually be closed between June 1, 2010 and
October 1, 2010. Microsoft will be closing newsgroups in a phased approach,
starting with the least active newsgroups and moving eventually to more
active ones throughout the course of the next six months.

When will this Happen?
Effective June 1, 2010 this newsgroup will be closed.

Where Should I go with the Closure of this Newsgroup?
Microsoft has a large selection of forums, many of which cover either the
same or closely related technologies to the ones found in the newsgroups.
The forums have seen amazing growth and are an excellent place to continue
the discussion. We recommend that you start with
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7security/threads

Should you want to visit the other Microsoft Forums, please go to
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/forums/default.mspx

Who Should I Contact with any Questions?
Send any questions about the process, recommended forums and timing to
NNTP(a)microsoft.com

From: VanguardLH on 10 May 2010 19:32
VanguardLH wrote:

> The feedback and discussion forums for the "Microsoft Forums NNTP Bridge"
> proxy prove how unreliable is Microsoft's solution. It might work but then
> stops working, it doesn't support the normal suite of NNTP commands, and a
> myriad of other problems reported by users of this gateway. Reading their
> forums shows that lots of users can't get their proxy working or keep it
> working. Also, access is very s-l-o-w when using their client (as it is
> when using their web interface).

I see why so many users are having severe problems with this NNTP-to-forums
proxy: Microsoft is NOT using a valid Message-ID value. When you look at
the headers for an article retrieved by their proxy, it has something like:

Message-ID: <20073bca-ecf4-4593-89b4-9fec1443bc4f>

Apparently Microsoft can't be bothered to slide in a valid domain-field on
the right-side of an "@" character. A valid MID should look like:

Message-ID: <20073bca-ecf4-4593-89b4-9fec1443bc4f(a)nntpbridge.microsoft.com>

or more simply:

Message-ID: <id-left(a)id-right>

Because many newsreaders use the MID for sorting or threading, the invalid
value is farking over a lot of newsreaders.
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