>> In the end I just gave up, the groups I frequented died out as people 
>> moved
>> to web-based forums
>
>  Why do people do that?

I think they are better for many reasons:
1) You don't need access to a usenet server
2) No spam, or very little spam that usually gets deleted
3) They are usually way better organised into sub- and sub-sub-forums, 
rather than just a huge list of threads
4) Moderators often move, merge or delete threads that are put in the wrong 
place, or ask already-asked questions.  This makes searching/browsing much 
easier
5) On some forums moderators often change the subject line to make searching 
easier, obviously this makes searching easier
6) "Sticky" threads always appear at the top of the list with things like 
the FAQ and anything else related to the subject
7) Many other useful functions like chatting/messaging directly with another 
user, seeing how many posts they've made, seeing how many people have read 
your post, etc.
8) More flexibility in presentation of posts, eg including images in certain 
places, text effects etc
9) Everyone gets the same experience by default, none of this "oh you need 
to turn on monospace fonts" or "don't top post you idiot" or "this is NOT a 
binary group" or "fix your line-wrap" or "DO NOT USE HTML" or "don't quote 
his entire post and add one word to the end" from all the net nannies that 
patrol every usenet group.

>  With usenet you don't need any accounts and passwords,

Which means lots of spam.

>  With web-based forums you have numerous completely different forums
> with different addresses, you need an account and password for each one
> of them.

You don't have a favourites folder to put the addresses in?  You can always 
use the same password for each forum, or tell your browser to remember the 
password.

>  Every time you need to ask a question about a topic you have never
> before dealt with (eg. about some new program you are trying), you can
> simply search for the proper usenet group and ask there.

And then be told to read the group's FAQ (how are you meant to know where 
that is beforehand?) or to search for the answer.  With a forum there will 
usually be a FAQ thread at the top of each sub-forum, and maybe even a 
"Newbies read this first" thread if you're lucky.

>  For example, comp.lang.c++ is a rather active group where you can
> actually get some real help if you have some problem about the language,
> and where you can help others, ask questions, and so on.

I tried to find a group for DirectX on usenet, and even on MS Communities 
(the MS usenet server) but none were particularly active compared to the web 
forums I found.

> Which web-based
> forum would be equivalent to that? I'm sure there are quite many of them,
> most of them with something like 5 users. Which one would be the best
> alternative to comp.lang.c++?

Googling "C++ forum" gives me codeguru.com which seems to be pretty active 
(861 users online when I checked).

>  This trend of everything going to WWW just sucks. Most internet users
> don't actually know that there's something *else* than WWW out there.

The only thing usenet is good for is being able to use it at work because it 
looks like you're just writing lots of emails to people and not that you're 
wasting time browsing the web :-)

Take pov.general for instance, there is a *huge* amount of very useful 
information in there, wouldn't it be great if it was organised into 
sub-categories like texturing, lighting, CSG etc, each with some FAQs for 
each sub category, with images included *at the right place* in the posts, 
and subject lines like "cubic meshes", "constructing a geometry", "mesh2" 
and "fractals.inc" renamed to something meaningful to help when 
browsing/searching?

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