Serial spammers

J

Jarrick Chagma

This newsgroup has become almost unusable thanks mainly to one serial
spammer. Can't anything be done to stop them?
 
N

Noah Roberts

Jarrick said:
This newsgroup has become almost unusable thanks mainly to one serial
spammer. Can't anything be done to stop them?
killfile is the best you can hope for.

You can try reporting them but you'll get a nice pandering letter and
then nothing will happen.
 
D

Default User

Jarrick said:
This newsgroup has become almost unusable thanks mainly to one serial
spammer. Can't anything be done to stop them?

See previous threads on the topic.




Brian
 
J

Juha Nieminen

Noah said:
You can try reporting them but you'll get a nice pandering letter and
then nothing will happen.

I have hard time believing this is the first time in the history of
the internet that a newsgroup has been flooded with spam. I also have
hard time believing this particular newsgroup has been saved from the
flood until now.

The spam flood started a couple of months ago. Before that, almost
nothing, then suddenly a huge flood. Something definitely has changed at
that point. But what?
 
D

Default User

Juha said:
The spam flood started a couple of months ago. Before that, almost
nothing, then suddenly a huge flood. Something definitely has changed
at that point. But what?

It started long before that. It just took a while to get around to
technical groups.




Brian
 
J

James

This newsgroup has become almost unusable thanks mainly to one serial
spammer.  Can't anything be done to stop them?

Maybe if we all visit their website and buy some stuff, they'll stop
advertising when they run out of inventory. :)

James
 
J

Juha Nieminen

Default said:
It started long before that. It just took a while to get around to
technical groups.

"A while" being about 20 years? I have hard time believing that.
 
D

Default User

Juha said:
almost >> nothing, then suddenly a huge flood. Something definitely
has changed >> at that point. But what?

"A while" being about 20 years? I have hard time believing that.

I'm confused. You said that, "The spam flood started a couple of months
ago." I'm not sure where 20 years comes in. If indeed the flood started
that recently, then it trailed other newsgroups like those in rec.*
hierarchies by a significant amount. I don't know, because NIN had
started their use of "cleanfeed" or whatever by then, so I never saw
any significant amount of spam here.




Brian
 
J

Juha Nieminen

Default said:
I'm confused. You said that, "The spam flood started a couple of months
ago." I'm not sure where 20 years comes in.

Let me quote myself:

"I have hard time believing this is the first time in the history of
the internet that a newsgroup has been flooded with spam. I also have
hard time believing this particular newsgroup has been saved from the
flood until now."

Something has stopped the spam flooding before (during the existence
of this newsgroup), but now something has seemingly changed.
 
D

Default User

Juha said:
Default User wrote:

Let me quote myself:

"I have hard time believing this is the first time in the history of
the internet that a newsgroup has been flooded with spam. I also have
hard time believing this particular newsgroup has been saved from the
flood until now."

Something has stopped the spam flooding before (during the existence
of this newsgroup), but now something has seemingly changed.

I don't remember there being a spam flood here before either. I
understand that there is one now for some people, but I've never really
seen it.

My impression was that the institutional spammers got started in some
other groups, and expanded to ones like clc++. I might be wrong.




Brian
 
R

Rolf Magnus

Noah said:
killfile is the best you can hope for.

You can try reporting them but you'll get a nice pandering letter and
then nothing will happen.

If you send your mail to the address in the Complaints-To header, you'll not
even get that. Google is simply ignoring the fact that more or less all of
Usenet's spam is sent through Google Groups.
 
A

Alf P. Steinbach

* Bill Davy:
They all seem to come from Organization: http://groups.google.com but OE
does not seem to permit filtering on Organization.



Can anyone recommend a good newsreader programme that does allow that
filtering?



I don't want lots of gimmicks, and I do not want it trying to take over the
world (not doing email, not being an Internet explorer, etc).



This is for XP.

Argh, perhaps I should write one, in C++. ;-)

For a while I thought in terms of modifying the functionality of some existing
free program, and created an extension for Thunderbird (NewsWorthy, sorry not
updated to work with recent versions of Thunderbird), but as it turned out
Thunderbird has a *lot* of bugs (e.g. in this connection Thunderbird sometimes
really screws up its own internal count of unread messages, mail and news), and
most of the functionality is completely undocumented, so I concluded it would
not be worthwhile to try to implement real filtering in Thunderbird.

However, when the base functionality is designed by oneself it should be fairly
easy... Yes, I actually think it's probably less work to implement a newsreader
from scratch than making Thunderbird do this thing. Because of bugs and the
undocumented and haphazard nature of that beast, old Netscape code.


Cheers,

- Alf
 
A

Alf P. Steinbach

* Bill Davy:
Interesting.

"IMPORTANT: Thunderbird requires you to have an SFF email account before you
can use the Newsreader functions"

Not quite what I was looking for then.

That's bull, where did you get that? I'm using Thunderbird now. But the problem
with filtering directly on Google Groups is that e.g. James Kanze is posting (by
necessity) via Google Groups, and he and some others are GG-posting people you
really want to read.


Cheers & hth.,

- Alf
 
I

Ian Collins

Thunderbird also correctly snips signatures!
Interesting.

"IMPORTANT: Thunderbird requires you to have an SFF email account before you
can use the Newsreader functions"

Nonsense.
 
B

Bill Davy

Bill said:
Interesting.

"IMPORTANT: Thunderbird requires you to have an SFF email account before you
can use the Newsreader functions"

Not quite what I was looking for then.

I just created this SFF account to say "Hello" :)
 
J

Jerry Coffin

[ ... ]
Argh, perhaps I should write one, in C++. ;-)

My advice would be to consider writing a filtering new server
instead. I.e. it connects to a news server of your choice, filters
out whatever you don't want, and your newsreader connects to this
local news server to collect its filtered feed of the news.

This should reduce the effort considerably, and be pretty easy to
make (mostly) portable -- not to mention making adoption a lot easier
since its only affect on the user would be the lack of spam.
 
A

Alf P. Steinbach

* Jerry Coffin:
[ ... ]
Argh, perhaps I should write one, in C++. ;-)

My advice would be to consider writing a filtering new server
instead. I.e. it connects to a news server of your choice, filters
out whatever you don't want, and your newsreader connects to this
local news server to collect its filtered feed of the news.

This should reduce the effort considerably, and be pretty easy to
make (mostly) portable -- not to mention making adoption a lot easier
since its only affect on the user would be the lack of spam.

Yeah, but it's not as fun. :)

Anyways, I see else-thread that one such evidently already exists,
<url: http://leafnode.sourceforge.net/>.

And of old there was Hamster (not sure about download and never used it) and
NewsProxy, <url: http://www.nfilter.org/>, used in combination.


Cheers,

- Alf
 

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