"Adrian C" wrote in message
...

I've often thought that inside a company, that a local newsgroup server
would be of some use as a collaborative tool, rather than group emails.
I'd readily implement one without a moments thought.

We did have one.
However the idiots that put it in decided that as it was "usenet" it should
be plaintext based.
this is a bit stupid when HTML postings actually work far better with a
modern reader rather than the antiquated stuff real usenet insists on
because of its traditions.
It didn't stay plain text for long as it was somewhat difficult to include
diagrams and the such in plain text.
Then we had complaints that their favourite "linux" reader didn't like
anything other than plain text.

The reality is as a collaboration tool plain text doesn't work. You can even
use it in some languages. Plain text normally means the ASCII subset and not
plaintext.