by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/08/02 13:44 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/08/02/4191351.aspx
Attention to people who use newsgroups! (all others can probably ignore)
I would like for people out there to prove me wrong.
Perhaps I should explain. :-)
As I have noted in the past, I keep an eye on some newsgroups. The current list I watch:
If you look at the traffic between all five of them, they hardly justify the creation of more than ONE newsgroup.
Now #1 and #3 and #5 were all added at various times at the behest of different people under the argument that people might find #4 to perhaps not apply to .NET, MSLU, or Word, respectively. In each case, the justification was made along the lines of confusion about where to post.
I won't disagree with the argument -- they are right. Though in my experience for the most part people are not shy about posting anyway saying "I was not sure where else to post this" and then they got their answers anyway.
I myself once made this argument and got #3 created myself. Though in retrospect I think I was wrong -- now the technology is not supported and the group is just this thing out there that is not very useful.
Anyway, some folks on the MUI team once again made the argument, this time feeling that people who were not programmers were not comfortable with microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international and that perhaps valuable interactions were not happening.
Like I said, I once made the argument, so I can't fault people too much for making it as well.
So there is now a new newsgroup: microsoft.public.windows.international, intended to cover more generally the features and bugs of Windows related to internationalization, localizability, globalization, MUI, typography, and so on.
Maybe it is not the very best possible name, and it hasn't gotten off to the very best start just yet (mostly people arguing about whether they should or can post in Russian?), but its intent was pure, and I'd really like to be proven wrong by the masses on this one.
So if you do use newsgroups and you have questions or comments or complaints or thoughts or kudos or whatever about the international features and/or bugs in Windows outside of the programmatic realm, then please consider posting there.
Every post will help prove me wrong. :-)
This post brought to you by ! (U+0021, a.k.a. EXCLAMATION MARK)
# Mihai on 2 Aug 2007 6:24 PM:
My guess is that those who read your blog are aware of (at least) microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international, and if they are not sure they also drop something in the suggestion box.
Those who do not read your blog will also not find out about your call to post in microsoft.public.windows.international.
So you are kind of preaching to the wrong choir :-)
But the current post is not 100% useless: I will add microsoft.public.windows.international to my "monitored" list :-)
# Mihai on 2 Aug 2007 11:08 PM:
If I look at the first posts there, it seems that ms.pub.win.internationalization would have been better :-)
# Mike on 3 Aug 2007 2:05 PM:
I would suggest formally updating the Word/Office MVPs with information about this group.
# Michael S. Kaplan on 3 Aug 2007 9:36 PM:
Hi Mike,
I am not sure how to do anything formally with the Word/Office MVPs, including updates.... :-)
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