Almost certainly the newsgroups will live on. What is changing is the link
to Microsoft's help forums, which (like many other similar web forums) have
been interfaced with the MS News server so what appears in one medium should
also appear in another. In future that link will be broken and the help
forums will change. NNTP access will then only be available to the new
Microsoft Answers forum via the NNTP Bridge. A new bridge for that purpose
was supposed to be available yesterday, but so far I see no sign of it at
http://connect.microsoft.com/MicrosoftForums/

Because of the way newsgroups are peered in Usenet, they will have a life of
their own even if/when Microsoft turns off their server. You will of course
need to find another text newsgroup server if you wish to continue using
them. There are plenty out there to choose from. Your ISP may provide a news
feed and that would be the first place to look. After that you need to look
for free text based news servers. They should also continue to be available
via Google Groups.

Inevitably as Microsoft steers its users elsewhere for their help, traffic
levels on the newsgroups will fall, and moderation may go out of the window
as Microsoft will not be spam filtering

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org



"Robert Macy" wrote in message
...
How many, which ones, of microsoftusenet groups will disappear?

Will this one, too?