Microsoft has announced that it intends to phase out its support newsgroups. The company currently has more than 2,000 public newsgroups used for tech support and developer dicussion, but in recent years has been migrating to a more commonplace, Web-based discussion forum platform. On top of these newsgroups, there are a further 2,200 private newsgroups used for beta discussion, MVP communities, and other closed communities.

The closure of the newsgroups will begin next month and will start with the least trafficked newsgroups, with users redirected to the relevant support forums.

The rationale that Microsoft gives is that the NNTP newsgroup platform is old and unsupported. Though the newsgroups did include official Microsoft representatives, they were unmoderated, and frequent victims of spam and virus attacks. Further, Microsoft's own newsgroup servers only had a 90-day retention policy, meaning that valuable answers ended up being purged. The forums, in contrast, are a platform that Microsoft actively develops. They are more accessible, especially since they show up in Web search results, and they offer additional functionality like answer acceptance and voting. These features, Microsoft believes, make them a better solution for online support.

The company says that newsgroup usage has dropped by half in the last year, while the online forums are seeing sizeable growth. This makes the decision to end the newsgroups unsurprising. Nonetheless, as an occasional user of the newsgroups since their introduction in 1996, and a fan of their old-fashioned, plain-text, threaded interface, I'm a little sad to see their demise.