Microsoft is going to close its activities in the usenet. Users are called to switch from newsgroups to the company’s forums.
Until now, Microsoft had been communicating with users of its diverse products by means of more than 2,000 public newsgroups. There are some additional 2,200 closed groups, for example for discussing specific trade partners’ problems.
The company now announced that starting from June 2010, the complete communication is moving to reworked forums of the TechNet, MSDN and Microsoft Answers platforms. Though, Microsoft is not reasoning that the Usenet is not being used much anymore nowadays and there would be more modern ways for customer communication.
Instead, the main reason is that forums are easier to protect against SPAM, enhancing the discussion quality. More advantages are that users are now able “to subscribe to forum activity they are interested in by subscribing to either RSS or to Live Alerts on any thread they are interested in tracking.”