news:microsoft.public.word.general is missing on NNTP servers

[Alex Vinokur]

Group exists on Google Groups
* http://groups.google.com/groups?group=microsoft.public.word.general
but is missing on NNTP servers:
* news://msnnews.msn.com
* news://msnews.microsoft.com
* news://news.microsoft.com.
* news://news.individual.net

Any reason for that?

 

[TF]

The general Newsgroup has not existed for over 5 years now - maybe longer.
It was removed because lazy posters never bothered to find which Newsgroup
was appropriate and 80% of posts were to General.

There are still Newsservers around the world that slurp the Microsoft
newsgroups and have never bothered to remove removed newsgroups - which is
why you think it still exists.




: Group exists on Google Groups
: * http://groups.google.com/groups?group=microsoft.public.word.general
: but is missing on NNTP servers:
: * news://msnnews.msn.com
: * news://msnews.microsoft.com
: * news://news.microsoft.com.
: * news://news.individual.net
:
: Any reason for that?
:
:
: --
: Alex Vinokur
: http://mathforum.org/library/view/10978.html
: http://sourceforge.net/users/alexvn
:
:
:
:
:

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Although deprecated by Microsoft many years ago (and not carried on msnews,
the MS news server, which is "slurped" by or peered with many other news
servers), the group still exists on some other news servers; obviously,
whatever one you're using is not one of them.

As Terry says, the reason Microsoft dropped it was that it was a catchall
not only for questions that didn't seem to fit in any specific group but
also for questions from users too lazy to figure out which group was most
appropriate. Ironically, when MS set up the Office Communities, it was
decided that each product area should have a group for "General Questions."
After some agonizing, the rather poorly defined word.docmanagement NG was
chosen for this purpose.