Post by Concerned recyclerCould it be this action is so MS can better control their Newsgroup
content ?
They already have resources committed to developing and maintaining
their web-based forums. They probably consider it a duplication of
resources to also maintain the forum frontend for their Communities
gateway to Usenet. Microsoft has been providing NNTP access for 14
years but dropping their forum-to-gateway service (which came much
later) makes for a good excuse (to them) for also dropping their NNTP
service first through attrition and later by killing their NNTP server.
NNTP is no longer included in later server versions of Windows. Windows
Server 2003 was the last that included an NNTP service but is no longer
in mainstream support. Microsoft isn't going to run an old unsupported
version of their server OS anymore and they won't run a 3rd party NNTP
server despite how very cheap running an NNTP service may be (as proven
by individuals who fork out-of-pocket expenses for a free service).
Microsoft never did have any control over the content of their
newsgroups. They had some filtering (which was flaky) for posts
submitted through *their* NNTP server but they could do nothing about
the same newsgroups that were peered across the worldwide mesh network
of NNTP servers (aka Usenet). They were unwilling to fork out the
resources to maintain a moderated newsgroup (which would still have
problems on other NNTP servers to which the group is peered). They are
unwilling to operate a private (non-peered) NNTP server that is publicly
accessible; i.e., they could just stop peering their NNTP server to
other NNTP servers and require users to register to login to use their
private NNTP server. But, again, they weren't interested in managing
the content of their newsgroups.