More here -
http://www.microsoft.com/communities...s/default.mspx

It's possible to continue to use your newsreader with the NNTP Bridge -
http://connect.microsoft.com/MicrosoftForums

It does seem to work, giving a pseudo newsreader UI to the web based forums
quite realistically.

It's a shame though. From my limited experience the new forums do not seem
to have any "character" at all. Whilst certain forums do indeed need
moderation I've never seen any useful reason for moderation in the Excel
groups, quite the reverse. Personally I don't want the points, stars, badges
or whatever, wish there was a way to opt out of getting them. For MVPs no
way to avoid adding the tag, at least not without getting a new ID.

One thing though remains to be seen, this excel.programming group is one of
the busiest, yet there doesn't seem to be a direct replacement for it.

Regards,
Peter T


wrote in message
...
Date 5/4/2010
Starting in early summer 2010, Microsoft will begin progressively closing
down the Microsoft public newsgroups to enrich conversations in the
rapidly-growing forum platform. This decision is in response to worldwide
market trends and evolving customer needs.

Microsoft continues to invest in forums to reduce customer effort,
consolidate community venues and make it easier for active contributors to
retain their influence. Forums provide a healthy community environment
with less spam and make answers easier to find by customers and search
engines. Additionally, forums offer a better user and off-topic
management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by
facilitating discussions in a clean space.

We understand that some newsgroups are still active, and important to the
community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be rolling out tools and
resources to minimize disruption to the community discussions.

We are working diligently on providing additional resources and
information in local languages later this week. In the meantime, please
refer to the official Microsoft Newsgroup website
http://www.microsoft.com/communities...s/default.mspx concerning
this issue. The Microsoft Newsgroup website will be made available in
additional languages in the next few days.