John John - MVP wrote:
Hector Santos wrote:
Ok, first, the microsoft.public.* newsgroups are not usenet.
Gee, I wonder why Microsoft themselves refer to them as Usenet groups...
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/guide/newsgroupfaq.mspx
Unfortunately, another case of Microsoft creating user confusion in this
regard.
Microsoft.public.* are *not* part of the usenet backbone newsgroup
listing nor backbone stream.
Check it out yourself. If you have access to a major ISP where you have
a high trunk line backwidth such as a T1 or T3, you will see that the
usenet feed newsgroup listing does not include microsoft.public.*
If a smaller ISP is showing microsoft.public.*, then they are directly
or indirectly going to Microsoft servers and are MERGING it with the
usenet listing. But they are two different sources of feeds.
#2, you won't have MS server to post, and if you found another, you
don't know if Google will be pulling from it or that your Serer will
be posting to GOOGLE.
People post to the groups from all kinds of different servers, when
the Microsoft servers are down these other servers still synchronize
between themselves without any problem and these folks who post on
other servers can still post and read without the intermediary of
Microsoft servers. We have often seen this in the past when outages of
a few hours or more at the Microsoft servers have happened and some of
us use other servers to keep on posting, when the Microsoft servers
come back only line they then "catch-up" and then all the posts show
up many hours latter on these servers. This is obvious enough when
you use non Microsoft servers to read the posts in Microsoft groups,
all kinds of posts which have not made it to the MS servers, or posts
which have been removed from the MS servers are on the other servers
for all to see and read.
All that will change one MS pulls the plug from the wall.
While you might find another site that keeps the newsgroups and they
still remain relatively active, that is only because the site itself
have become the MAIN source for others to feed into - a large part of
the chain. But those chains that feed off Microsoft only are lost
unless they feed into someone else.
small guys like aioe carry them. If these guys refuse to honor the
carrying the groups. There is no denying that a majority of the posts