The Spammers Have Really Trashed This NG.

[Arne Vajhøj]

I use that approach from time to time, but what do you think of the idea
of a moderated version of this group?

Give the volume of this group, then I am skeptical about the
approach.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

If you're using one of the Unices, Pan has pretty good spam filtering -
certainly good enough to killfile pestiferous posters and/or threads.

Killing post fact is not that hard.

The hard problem is recognizing spam the first time.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

GG is not a good place to do that. First, there are systems
canceling spam (if it exceed the BI-coefficient) but GG
ignores cancels

So does many real news servers.

Arne

 

[Jerry Gerrone]

The trick to spammer is to use your killfile (K in Thunderbird) to
remove unwanted threads.  As long as you do that proactively, there's
only a few spam each day to remove.  It's not too bad.

You can also use even Thunderbird's relatively limited killfile ability to
filter out 163.com, [insult deleted] and the like.

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

I did a quick count of spam posts across the first 3
pages of c.l.j.p. as it is represented in GG. The 1st
page had 8, the 2nd 16, and the 3rd 19 out of 30 posts.
That is 43/90, or almost 50%. *

Are you counting posts or the threads? The spam threads rarely
accumulate posts: excluding a certain cross-posted flamebait, the only
killed threads in here with more than 5 or 6 posts are ones which
generated real discussion. In comparison, over half the threads in the
past two months alone that are not killed generated more than 10 posts.

This newsgroup also does not suffer from trolls attaching to useful
threads, such as the Musatov character in sci.math.

In general, I think 90% of the spam can be caught be looking for keywords.

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

This is a very important point, especially for questions of fact, where
many people will have the same position. I often don't post because
everything I would say in answer to a question has already been posted
by the time I see the question.

I suspect that the correct, relevant, but repetitive replies might be a
worse form of noise than the current spam. They would appear in on-topic
threads. They would be posted by people whose writings I want to read
when they have something new to say. How would I know, without opening
and reading each, which make new points and which are just repeats?

Patricia

As to the latter point, to me it depends on the question. If it's a
complex question with no one single correct answer, I like to see quite
a few replies by people who I know to be knowledgeable, and see what the
various takes are.

Not only that, if I follow a certain NG for a while, it's questions of
this sort that let me assess posters who I am not familiar with yet. If
someone I don't know weighs in alongside people I respect, and their
answer clearly is not derivative, and it falls roughly into line with
what the others had to say, I notch up their "score", so to speak.

As I say, it does depend on the question.

AHS

 

[Roedy Green]

The spammers have really trashed this forum, and I can find no effective way
to filter them out. Is there a moderated version of this NG anywhere?

You can use regexes on the subject or author line in Forte Agent. This
gets rid of some of it. What I would like is some sort of Bayesian
filter, or some sort of collaborative post ranking
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"For reason that have a lot to do with US Government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction."
~ Paul Wolfowitz 2003-06, explaining how the Bush administration sold the Iraq war to a gullible public.

 

[markspace]

I use that approach from time to time, but what do you think of the idea
of a moderated version of this group?

I have to echo some concerns by Andrew and Arne. Moderation is not a
concept that I've seen work well on newsgroups or mailing lists. Then
there's the standards used for moderation. Who's a spammer, and who's
just being silly advertising something Java related? Do we ban all job
listings? Folks with one single link to their blog? Too much here is
personal preference.

The idea of making a forum, and having moderators purge obvious spam is
interesting. Similar to Andrew's mention of Sun's forums. But then
someone has to pay for hosting.

Summary: my kill file is working well enough for me that I don't see the
need to dive into moderation right now.

 

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

I did a quick count of spam posts across the first 3
pages of c.l.j.p. as it is represented in GG. The 1st
page had 8, the 2nd 16, and the 3rd 19 out of 30 posts.
That is 43/90, or almost 50%. *

And that was not counting those trollish posts based
on the "Computer Programming Job in CA" idiot thread.

Is it possible your news server is taking some effort
to suppress spam posts?

* Yeah, yeah.. "Lies, damned lies & statistics."

I don't really see much spam at all.
I think news.individual must filter out most of it.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

 

[Ichiro]

The spammers have really trashed this forum, and I can find no effective way
to filter them out. Is there a moderated version of this NG anywhere?

Amen to that.
For an example of moderation that works, see

comp.lang.c++

vs

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Note, the latter is _not_ a moderated version of the former, they live
independent lives.
This is how it works, and it works really well:

http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm

Cheers

 

[Seamus MacRae]

I did a quick count of spam posts across the first 3
pages of c.l.j.p. as it is represented in GG. The 1st
page had 8, the 2nd 16, and the 3rd 19 out of 30 posts.
That is 43/90, or almost 50%. *

And that was not counting those trollish posts based
on the "Computer Programming Job in CA" idiot thread.

Your insulting mischaracterization is not appreciated.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

That insulting mischaracterization is not appreciated.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

This insulting mischaracterization is not appreciated.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

That insulting mischaracterization is not appreciated.

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

If you don't believe me, check if you can see the following
message
<in ec.games.chess.misc. That's the last post that was canceled
when I was checking the corresponding control-group about five
minutes ago. Here is the complete cancel-post:

...


There's your problem. Google has been serving Usenet spammers since at
least 2004 and I wouldn't count on them stopping any time soon. Drop
all articles with "googlegroups.com" in the Message-ID and the problem
is solved.

 

[whooja]

That insulting mischaracterization is not appreciated.

By you or Series Experience?

 

[Ichiro]

Drop
all articles with "googlegroups.com" in the Message-ID and the problem
is solved.

Pure genius.

 

[Series Expansion]

These tiresome personal attacks do not constitute rational arguments
in favor of either Lisp or Java, "Lew" and Andrew.

 

[Series Expansion]

A pity it is not bullet-proof.  
<http://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/
219a2c7cec2fe278?>

These tiresome personal attacks do not constitute rational arguments
in favor of either Lisp or Java, Andrew and "Lew".

 

[Series Expansion]

I don't think he intended to argue Java over Lisp or the other
way around.

There's no other reason for him to be attacking me, since I've not
publicly taken a strong position on any other issue.

For some weird reason I think he arguing about the level of spam
here.

That makes no sense, since I have nothing whatsoever to do with that.

Really weird what one can conclude when reading what one is replying
to.

These tiresome personal attacks do not constitute rational arguments
in favor of either Lisp or Java, Arne.