A bit of history from an old and current NNTP user (FidoNet, Usenet, and other private news servers).<br /><br />[Edit: The newsgroups Claudio was asking about] are hosted on forums.macromedia.com. They were in use and very active years before Macromedia added that nasty FuseTalk Web application. No login was ever required to read and post to that server. You can point your newsreader application to that server, download its list of newsgroups, and begin reading/posting in any group. <br /><br />The Web application simply reads from, and posts to the news server - munging code and message headers along the way. But if you want to use the Web access, you do have to use a login. If you never registered software at the former Macromedia site, you would need to create a new login for this. (I don't recommend it.) Or they may have had a separate login, I don't recall, exactly.<br /><br />Adobe has a separate NNTP server, adobeforums.com, that I believe was also around before the WebX application provided HTTP access. It does not require login to read the messages with a newsreader, but if you want to post to that server with a newsreader, you do have to login with an Adobe ID. Most newsreader programs provide a way to do that.<br /><br />Neither of these servers are really considered part of Usenet. While they do make their feeds available to other news servers*, they do not get newsfeeds from other servers. That is why sites such as groups.google.com (formerly dejanews.com) can archive the posts for posterity, but cannot post to these newsgroups.<br /><br />* I /think/ adobeforums.com may have discontinued this practice.<br /><br />That's how it went to the best of my recollection tonight.<br /><br /><Warning: newsgroup .sigfile follows><br /><br />-- <br />Mark A. Boyd<br />Keep-On-Learnin' 🙂