As of June 1st 2010, Microsoft will start to close down the lesser used parts of the msnews newsgroups, and by the end of the year, all will be gone, replaced by forums.

In view of the above, and the fact that Microsoft never set up any Windows 7 groups, I have not been accessing the newsgroups at all recently. Microsoft Help will be pointing users in the direction of the forums, so there is little point in starting or propagating threads anymore. Even though there is an NNTP Bridge in existence which gives more or less the same look, there are forum features that will not carry across for technical reasons which I will not divulge here.

There are many old stagers like myself who are sorry to see the demise of full NNTP. It may have been dirty, but it was a quick and efficient way to deliver help to thousands. However, we have to move on or be left in the wake, and today I removed the MSNEWS account that has been a part of my Outlook Express/Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail for so long.

The original Microsoft MVPs were picked out of the really ancient Compuserve help groups, and those guys griped a little when they had to change to the NNTP newsgroup format. So you see, change is nothing new, and here am I, reminiscing about the demise of NNTP and, if I live long enough, will probably gripe about the demise of forums at some time in the future.

Anyway, it is not all doom and gloom. More than a few MVPs and others will make the transition and still help computer users worldwide..

For those of you who do not know where to find the forums, follow this link.

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories

The list of forums is evolving constantly, and more will appear as the NNTP newsgroups disappear