Project Description
Community project for accessing the MS Answers-Forums (http://answers.microsoft.com/) with any NNTP client. It provides an NNTP server (bridge) for the forums. Please read the restrictions below before you download!

Request to all users of the bridge

Please set (under advanced options) the option DisableUserAgentInfo to true.

This disables the sending of the newsreader info. As it appears this causes some minor rendering issues for uses and isn't of much value, so Microsoft asked us to spread the word to disable it. Thanks! This feature will get removed or altered in an upcoming version of the bridge. (No date!) 


Usage of the bridge, see http://communitybridge2.codeplex.com/documentation

Features

  • The first version of the bridge will support the same functionality as the old microsoft bridge for the old forum, this means
    • Connect every news reader to this bridge
    • By default the NNTP port is 120 (to prevent collisions with the msdn/social/technet-bridge which uses 119)
    • Mapping of the forums metadata into several newsgroups
    • Reply to messages (creating new threads is currently not supported)
    • Can be used side-by-side with the other community bridge (social/msdn/technet)
  • In also has the following additional features:
    • PlainText-Converter to convert HTML from the forum into plain-text messages
    • Direct access to the forums URL by inserting the url into the message signature
    • Prefetching of newsgroups / newsgroupslist
    • Logging of all relevant actions
    • Sending diagnostics data to the developers to find problems

Planned features

  • Detecting changes of messages / threads (for example marked as answer or edited) (by mid of February)
  • Detecting deleted threads / messages (by mid of February)
  • Merge of both bridges into one bridge (end of march)

Restrictions

  • The bridge can only by used by a group of selected users. At the moment this are MVPs and some other selected users. If you want to use this NNTP bridgem then please follow the instructions here:
    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/feedback/forum/feedback_other-na/update-nntp-bridge-availablity/0a1f0614-9a2b-4d1e-89c7-26690913230f
  • The web service has a restriction of 1000 last threads. So you are not able to get more than the last 1000 threads (which means about 3000 messages). In high traffic forums, it is recommended to use a subgroup of the forum to restrict the number of new threads to a specific meta-info (like excel or word).
  • You cannot create new posts; you can only reply to existing posts!
  • Because of a restriction in the Live-Id component, your password must not exceed 16 characters

Last edited Apr 19 at 3:59 PM by kaisch, version 17