If its dead, is there a successor?
The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles (aka netnews), as well as transferring news among news servers.
NNTP isn't dead. It just smells funny.
Sadly, these days if you want to follow 10 different forums then you need to have 10 different accounts and learn 10 different UIs. I like being able to pick the newsreader that I like and have the same interface for all of my newsgroups. OpenID may bring some of this back, but I'm afraid that the "new internet" just doesn't care about interoperability like the "old internet" did.
It is not dead, but still used by guys who do prefer plain-text over animated emoticons and flashy ad-banners.
Seriously, I have been using it since ten years and I cannot detect any drop in the number of articles or users.
It's not dead - there's still plenty of traffic in the public C# group, for instance.
StackOverflow is becoming a pseudo-successor - but only for some kinds of threads. Q&A threads are ideally suited to SO; discussion threads don't work nearly as well here as they do in newsgroups.
It's not dead (yet?) but it's being replaced by feeds and feedreader (RSS and Atom)
It's nowhere near as relevant as it once was. Nowadays any popular forum is going to be web-based. For example, stackoverflow would be very crap if based around NNTP. You just can't provide the same experience when your interaction with the forum software is so limited.
Another big problem is that you can't display a CAPTCHA over NNTP, or indeed provide any other modern interactive anti-spam measure.
I'd say yes, it's practically dead.
Agreed, NNTP's time is past. We have good connectivity; there is no need to replicate data across multiple servers any more. I use Google Groups in preference to NNTP.
However, NNTP does provide some community assurance against catastrophic failure. There's probably an open-source project in there somewhere for web-based forums to provide this kind of distributed, fault-tolerant, load-balanced services.
I know many people like myself who still use nntp / usenet on a daily basis. It is an absolutely invaluable tool. I doubt it will go away anytime soon.
It's like the pinball machine of online communities. All the new kids may not know what it's all about and may think it is dead, but it is still alive and kicking and there's still nothing that can compare.
I have never been on Usenet. But I use several “private” NNTP servers (disconnected from Usenet), including the awesome NNTP interface to mailing lists: http://gmane.org/
Edit: oh and none of those servers I use needs an "account". Yet they're quite spam-free.