Reminder - Microsoft Responds to the Evolution of Community
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From: John W. Vinson on 20 May 2010 18:32 On Thu, 20 May 2010 20:05:37 GMT, "PieterLinden via AccessMonster.com" <u49887(a)uwe> wrote: >Will we still be able to access the NG through AccessMonster? The MS >implementation of the NG was AWFUL. The NGs were better like 12 years ago - >lumping all the application questions in a single newsgroup isn't terribly >helpful. The Answers web forum will not be propagated outside Microsoft, it seems; it will certainly not be put on Usenet/NNTP etc., so posts will not be on Google Groups, AccessMonster, or much of anyplace else (at least as currently structured). The msnews.microsoft.com server, the originating point for all newsgroup posts, will *cease to exist*. Any service (such as AccessMonster) which relies on posts to this server for their information will stop getting anything. The newsgroups microsoft.public.access.* may or may not continue to be available on other news servers (aioe.org, eternalseptember.com, etc.) - it depends on how aggressively Microsoft pushes other ISP's to remove the groups from their servers and to what extent they comply. Newsgroups are like vampires... VERY hard to kill... so I suspect they'll be around for a long while, but will stop getting any input directed to them by Microsoft; the vast majority of questions come through the support.microsoft.com website and this source will cease. I suspect that volume of legitimate questions will go way down and the volume of spam and flamewars will go way up. The non-Microsoft forum comp.databases.ms-access is available and apparently some old friends of mine are reestablishing a presence there. How this will all play out is hard to predict; we'll just see over the summer how Answers, the newsgroups, and other alternatives shake down! -- John W. Vinson [MVP]
From: Tony Toews [MVP] on 20 May 2010 18:36 "PieterLinden via AccessMonster.com" <u49887(a)uwe> wrote: >Will we still be able to access the NG through AccessMonster? The MS >implementation of the NG was AWFUL. The NGs were better like 12 years ago - >lumping all the application questions in a single newsgroup isn't terribly >helpful. Possibly. There are many newsgroup servers out there which carry the MS hierarchy of newsgroups. Speculation is high that they will continue to carry the MS newsgroups. So if AccessMonster peers with non MS newsgroup server you should be fine. Also some/many of us MVPs will continue to be active in the MS newsgroups as well as comp.databases.ms-access. Tony -- Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/ For a convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/ Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/
From: David W. Fenton on 20 May 2010 18:37 "Larry Linson" <bouncer(a)localhost.not> wrote in news:#isoh2C#KHA.4652(a)TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl: > Newsgroup support (not Microsoft-sponsored) is still available in > the USENET newsgroup comp.databases.ms-access, which pre-dates the > Microsoft-sponsored newsgroups (back then, Microsoft's support was > on the for-fee service CompuServe). Many ISPs have discontinued > news server support, but there are quite a number of news servers > available, free and fee. For instance: http://www.eternal-september.org/ > As a final note, quite a number of Access MVPs, whose names you > will recognize from the Microsoft-sponsored newsgroups, have > posted in comp.database.ms-access that they "are back". It's > almost like a "Homecoming". I haven't seen much in the way of a traffic spike there. -- David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/ usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
From: David W. Fenton on 20 May 2010 18:47 "PieterLinden via AccessMonster.com" <u49887(a)uwe> wrote in news:a84d2042977b2(a)uwe: > The NGs were better like 12 years ago - > lumping all the application questions in a single newsgroup isn't > terribly helpful. I disagree. I find the breakdown of all the Access questions into a bunch of overlapping issues to be quite unhelpful. Where do you post a question that overlaps more than one of the groups? I think it's better to have one big newsgroup with lots of daily traffic. I *could* see breaking it down into a main newsgroup and some specialized newsgroups for, say, queries, forms/reports and maybe client/server. But a breakdown more granular than that soon runs into major problems. I thought about including VBA as one of the topics, but realized that it would overlap the forms/reports group (not to mention the client/server one). I don't think one large active group is a problem at all, but I read with a newsreader that makes it easy for me to keep track of what I've read and what I haven't. Search is accomplished through Google Groups (such as it is -- they've really screwed it up by not actually limiting your search to the terms you put in, especially in regard to limiting to particular newsgroups). I do admit that I read nearly every day, so there's never that big of an accumulation to get through. And I don't begin to read everything. I scan topics and see what's hot, and see what the people whose names I've chosen to follow are discussion and read what they're talking about. Trying to read everything even every day would be way too much! -- David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/ usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
From: David W. Fenton on 20 May 2010 18:51
"M Skabialka" <mskabialka(a)NOSPAMdrc.com> wrote in news:OooIahE#KHA.4076(a)TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl: > Let me rephrase: When I use Outlook Express to add an account, it > asks for the name of the News (NNTP) Server. I want the one where > I would find comp.databases.ms-access and other USENET groups. > What is the name of that server? I think you don't understand Usenet. Newsgroups do not exist on a single server -- it is a distributed network. Each individual news server administrator will decide which newsgroups to carry. I know that eternalseptember carries CDMA, for instance, as I monitor it in comparison to my news server (newsguy.com, a pay service). You might want to read the Wikipedia article on Usenet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet -- David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/ usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/ |