Update - Microsoft Responds to the Evolution of Community

[Lawrence Garvin [MVP]]

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.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/threads

Freaking wonderful!

They're sending us to the *WRONG* newsgroup...<sigh>..

I'll get some people's attention ASAP and get this fixed.

The *CORRECT* newsgroup for =WSUS= assistance is:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverwsus/threads/

[Rich Wonneberger]

I looked at the forums the last few days.
One of the things I do not like is I have no way to flag what messages I
read and what are new.
I can set the list to the latest posting, the latest reply, but I have
to scroll through to see where I last read.
I also have SeaMonkey set to remove messages 30 days old.

I will miss this feed. :(

Rich W.

What is Happening?
This message is to inform you that Microsoft will soon begin discontinuing
newsgroups and transitioning users to Microsoft forums.

[Lawrence Garvin [MVP]]

Post by Rich Wonneberger
I looked at the forums the last few days.
One of the things I do not like is I have no way to flag what messages I
read and what are new.

FWIW, Read message are automatically flagged as read, and there is an
"Unread" filter that you can use. I do, though, find it unfortunate that I
cannot mark a READ message as UNREAD so that I can defer responding to it
until later, as it's very difficult to find (search is not reliable)
messages once they've lost their filterability.

Post by Rich Wonneberger
I will miss this feed. :(

As will many, Rich.

FWIW.. the story goes that these newsgroups are still being fed on Exchange
2003 and since Microsoft chose not to include NNTP in Exchange 2007, they
kinda bit themselves in the backside.

On the other hand, newsgroups are really not a single-point-of-origin thing,
so for those who are able to find newsservers outside of the Microsoft
realm, some of these microsoft.public newsgroups may continue to be
accessible to the general public for years to come. The tough part will be
finding a newsserver.

[Harry Johnston [MVP]]

Post by Lawrence Garvin [MVP]

Post by Rich Wonneberger
I looked at the forums the last few days.
One of the things I do not like is I have no way to flag what messages
I read and what are new.

FWIW, Read message are automatically flagged as read, and there is an
"Unread" filter that you can use.

Or more precisely, messages that have been sent to your web browser are marked
as read, regardless of whether you actually looked at them or not. This turned
out to be a deal-breaker for me, the first time I accidentally closed the
browser window which had all the unread threads waiting on separate tabs.

I hope to get time to try out the NNTP <-> forums bridge. This is supposed to
allow you to use a newsreader to access the forums, although I'm not sure
whether they've got all the bugs out yet.

Harry.

[Lawrence Garvin [MVP]]

Post by Harry Johnston [MVP]

Post by Lawrence Garvin [MVP]

Post by Rich Wonneberger
I looked at the forums the last few days.
One of the things I do not like is I have no way to flag what messages
I read and what are new.

FWIW, Read message are automatically flagged as read, and there is an
"Unread" filter that you can use.

Or more precisely, messages that have been sent to your web browser are
marked as read, regardless of whether you actually looked at them or not.

This has not been my observation, Harry.

Post by Harry Johnston [MVP]
This turned out to be a deal-breaker for me, the first time I accidentally
closed the browser window which had all the unread threads waiting on
separate tabs.

Oh!.. Separate *tabs*.. so then you really did open the threads. :-D

Post by Harry Johnston [MVP]
I hope to get time to try out the NNTP <-> forums bridge. This is
supposed to allow you to use a newsreader to access the forums, although
I'm not sure whether they've got all the bugs out yet.

No.. they don't.. <sigh>

I loaded it up a couple of weeks ago.

However, the messaging interface is actually pretty good. In fact, I found
it easier and more convenient to compose message in WLM with the bridge than
I did online; however, it had two deal-killers for me.

1. Messages actually *read* in WLM have no way of being marked as read in
the online environment. Since I'm a moderator of the WSUS forum, having
access to the online environment is a requirement to perform "moderator"
duties, which also means I don't want to have to sift through already read
messages that require no moderator action. So while WLM/Bridge may be an
option for me for other forums, it didn't test well for use in the WSUS
forum. Also, there's no real access to the "forums features", such as
marking questions as helpful, proposing as an answer, etc. -- so it may be a
good tool for offline searching (which is totally broken in the online
environment), or message archival, or marking a read message as unread for
later processing .. but it'll likely always be lacking in the full feature
set.

2. About two weeks into the test, I encountered a "news server not
available" error, which I could not trace to an actual fault. Restarting the
bridge did not resolve the issue. It may be tied to another 'bug' I just
discovered in the Win7 environment (-- it seems that authentication with SQL
Server becomes broken after a Win7 machine is revived from
sleep/hibernation --), so it's possible it was an authentication issue
caused by the machine being placed in sleep/hibernation. Today I had to
reboot to clear the SQL Server authentication issue so I could continue work
on a project, so I may fire the bridge back up and do some more testing with
other forums where I'm not a moderator and will never use the online
environment if I don't have to and don't care that messages are not marked
as "read".

[Rich Wonneberger]

Lawrence,

Will have to look for the filter.
I was trying the sort order options, but none seemed usable for me.

Thanks
Rich W.

Post by Lawrence Garvin [MVP]

Post by Rich Wonneberger
I looked at the forums the last few days.
One of the things I do not like is I have no way to flag what messages
I read and what are new.

FWIW, Read message are automatically flagged as read, and there is an
"Unread" filter that you can use. I do, though, find it unfortunate that
I cannot mark a READ message as UNREAD so that I can defer responding to
it until later, as it's very difficult to find (search is not reliable)
messages once they've lost their filterability.