OT : del porque los grupos van a dejar de funcionar a partir de Mayo

Este es un mensaje publicado en el grupo de IE6 por
Enrique Cortés (MVP):
La pregunta es ¿que hacemos para mantener la comunidad de VFP?

Julio Rossi
VFP9 - SP2
WINDOWS 7 ULTIMATE

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The purpose of this communication is to inform you of our plan to
strengthen our technical community and provide a long-term
community value to our users, via the migration of Microsoft NNTP
public newsgroups to web-based Microsoft community forums.
This forums plan has been in development and now it reached a
phase where is worthy of your attention.

As a result of our continuous investment in community and the
rise of social media, growth in our forums has been consistently
increasing since its launch, as we are serving today more than
15M customer
visits per month with an average growth of 12% month-over-month.
Community participation in newsgroups has declined by 48% during
this time, and trending looks to reflect this decline
month-over-month.

Microsoft's goal is to unify on one approach so that all community
users can receive maximum value from the knowledge created by
community leaders such as yourself. This move will also eliminate
the existing fragmented and disconnected experience resulting
from the multiple platforms that are offered today. Users will
also benefit from the personalization and discoverability
of solutions that we can enable in the forums environment.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has invested in web-based
forums technology to offer a richer and up-to-date online
experience to our community which is fully-aligned with market
trends. This facilitates the addressing of scenarios around
discussions and Q&A as well as providing better integration
with our product web properties.

The existing newsgroup platform (NNTP) is running on an outdated
version of Microsoft Exchange that has reached its
end-of-life and is no longer supported due to a business
decision taken by Microsoft many years ago. This makes it
impossible to enhance basic functionality, keep the platform
secure and deliver a healthy experience for you and our
communities.

Beginning in May 2010, Microsoft will begin announcing the
progressive discontinuance of public newsgroups and start
inviting users to use the Microsoft forums that include Microsoft
Answers, TechNet and MSDN.
This move will add substantial benefits for the whole
community such as: centralized searchable content,
the improved ability for top contributors (like yourself)
to retain their influence, the reduction of redundancies,
making content easier to find, better indexing and
advanced moderation capabilities (including offline
accessibility). Overall, forums offer a better spam
and user management platform that will improve customer
satisfaction by ensuring a healthy discussion space and
minimizing the effect of spam, trolls, off-topic messages,
synchronization, etc.