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From: FUBARinSFO on 19 Dec 2009 00:04
Hi

Haven't been here in a while, and I see the group bombed by all this
spam. Isn't there a moderator or a spam filter to clean this stuff
up. Too bad for the group, it seems.

-- Roy
From: kony on 19 Dec 2009 01:57
On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:04:42 -0800 (PST), FUBARinSFO
<file1303(a)gmail.com> wrote:

>Hi
>
>Haven't been here in a while, and I see the group bombed by all this
>spam. Isn't there a moderator or a spam filter to clean this stuff
>up. Too bad for the group, it seems.
>
>-- Roy


It's a public newsgroup so no moderators. There probably
are spam filters on a per-server basis, apparently the one
you access doesn't do enough.

If the ones you see seem to have some pattern, you might try
setting a newsreader up to filter and delete and/or not
download based on that.

Otherwise blame Google, they leave a wide open hole with
easy to get, free google groups accounts. Sometimes I
wonder if they even give preference to spammers that have
business with them, after all they are in the advertising
business so it would've seemed prudent to set up their
groups service to filter out ads competitive to those of
their paying customers.

The above paragraph is a hint, the easiest way to filter at
present is to just block all from google groups - get a
proper newsreader and use a personal usenet account instead
of google groups.
From: FUBARinSFO on 19 Dec 2009 04:14
Thanks, kony -- the screen I see comes via IE7/IE8 to
groups.google.com/group/alt.comp.hardware/... Some spammers bomb some
google groups, and makes them look like toilets instead of serious
sources of problems and solutions.

-- Roy
From: Paul on 19 Dec 2009 05:52
FUBARinSFO wrote:
> Thanks, kony -- the screen I see comes via IE7/IE8 to
> groups.google.com/group/alt.comp.hardware/... Some spammers bomb some
> google groups, and makes them look like toilets instead of serious
> sources of problems and solutions.
>
> -- Roy

You can read news on free servers such as www.aioe.org or
www.eternal-september.org . The first one has no authentication.
The second one, you can apply for an account. Both are free,
and are intended for low volume text-only. Perfect for
reading news. The un-authenticated one, has an upper limit of
25 outgoing posts per day, and has extensive filters in place on
outgoing (which annoy some of the more free-wheeling users).

You use a newsreader with that, something which follows
conventions well. In years past, it might have been
something like Forte Agent. I'm using Mozilla.org Thunderbird
2.0.0.23 right now, and it works well. So with about
ten minutes of work, you can be reading (somewhat) filtered
content from a free private server. Yes, spam still leaks
in, because the nature of NNTP protocol, makes it pretty
hard to cover every possibility (short of being a mind
reader).

Comparing what I see on the free server, to the Google article
list, there are fewer "shoe commercials" from China. But
not down to zero.

Since the servers are typically run by just one person,
that person still sleeps at night. If there is a service
outage, they're not paged or anything, and it may take a
while until they resolve the service issue. It helps to
have multiple servers in your newsreader program, to cover
a service outage. I use the two suggested above.

Paul
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