Ridiculous Corporate Behavior

[JE McGimpsey]

Side note--actually, this *is* an MS user forum. I don't know how you
are accessing the forum or where you think you are, but you are posting
to the newsgroup microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage, which is hosted
on servers paid for and controlled by MS--that's why the direct server
address is msnews.microsoft.com in a newsreader. Any website you may be
using is simply pulling the threads from the group, or perhaps your news
server is mirroring the MS server. I don't see any cross-posting happening.

That's not really the way Usenet works. Yes, MS does provide a server
farm to host the newsgroups, and it's quick and easy to connect there,
but there's nothing inherently special about using the MS servers. I
could use my ISP's news server, and my posts would eventually (from
seconds to hours) get distributed to the other news servers all over the
world, including MS's.

If MS's news server farm went away (as it does from time to time), it
causes barely a blip in the rest of usenet - I can still post to and
read from m.p.mac.office* on my ISP's server, and it will be seen on
other servers, including Google Groups, though perhaps not as quickly.
When MS's farm comes back on line, it will sync with other servers out
there so that my post gets sucked in.

The advantage to connecting to the MS server farm directly is that it's
a primary node - many of the other major news servers will directly suck
from and dump to the MS servers, so the response time is relatively
fast. It's also the first news server that the web interface dumps into.

But posts to googlegroups are immediately available on googlegroups,
even if they take some time to migrate to MS's farm (several years ago,
it often took hours for a googlegroups post to show up at msnews). Which
server a particular web interface pulls from is speculative, at best -
they certainly don't HAVE to go directly to msnews.

ahbijef isn't using the ms servers directly - he's coming in through
googlegroups, which routed his message through giganews, prodigy, and
cwix before his post ever hit the MS servers.

And the sole intention and reason for existence of this newsgroup is to
allow people who use MS software to help other people use MS software
more easily. Everything else is simply a side effect.

The sole intention and reason for existence of this newsgroup is
whatever the posters choose to post.

Yes, by netiquette, posters should try to pick a newsgroup that's
relevant to their topic, but there's no enforcement body.

Even MS's evident filtering of spam/inappropriate commercial posts only
applies to its own servers - MS doesn't have the right (or the ability)
to filter other servers.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

That's not really the way Usenet works. Yes, MS does provide a server
farm to host the newsgroups, and it's quick and easy to connect there,
but there's nothing inherently special about using the MS servers. I
could use my ISP's news server, and my posts would eventually (from
seconds to hours) get distributed to the other news servers all over the
world, including MS's.

Thanks, JE--but if the MS servers went away forever, or never had been
established, would the group still exist? MS questions would be handled
in the general comp hierarchy somewhere, I assume? (as they often are)

The sole intention and reason for existence of this newsgroup is
whatever the posters choose to post.

The reason it was *started*. What other people choose to post is a side
effect--the group certainly develops into more, but Abijah's
construction that this is some third-party forum designed to challenge
MS is just nonsense.

Yes, by netiquette, posters should try to pick a newsgroup that's
relevant to their topic, but there's no enforcement body.

I very carefully did not say there was.

Daiya

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Thanks, JE--but if the MS servers went away forever, or never had been
established, would the group still exist? MS questions would be handled
in the general comp hierarchy somewhere, I assume? (as they often are)

If the MS servers went away forever, the ms newsgroups would continue as
long as people posted to them - they'd just have to get them from a
different news server (just as most do now).

msnews is a specialty server farm, since it ONLY carries ms newsgroups.
But it's not correct to say that the msnews server is "the" host of
those newsgroups. It's simply "a" host. My ISP hosts ms newsgroups, as
well as 50,000 others.

Once a newsgroup is started, it's exceedingly difficult to kill. That's
why MS keeps carrying deprecated groups - better to monitor them and
provide a filtered feed than to let them go feral.

The reason it was *started*. What other people choose to post is a side
effect--the group certainly develops into more, but Abijah's
construction that this is some third-party forum designed to challenge
MS is just nonsense.

Absolutely!

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

If the MS servers went away forever, the ms newsgroups would continue as
long as people posted to them - they'd just have to get them from a
different news server (just as most do now).

Thanks, JE, for the education.

Daiya

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

If the MS servers went away forever, the ms newsgroups would continue as
long as people posted to them - they'd just have to get them from a
different news server (just as most do now).

I also access these groups through news.free.fr. The newsgroups are
relayed (mirrored) on multiple servers.

Corentin