From: Terence on
I see, by count, that there are now 1 genuine forran postings per 3
pages of titles. At 30 odd titles per page, that makes it close to a
99% spam proportion.Anybody know how something can be done?
Or where to report in Google? Where I've never ever seen a reply in
the Help Forum?
Repeat: some readers cannot have a censored effective "newsreader"
solution.
From: feenberg on
On Apr 11, 4:41 am, Terence <tbwri...(a)cantv.net> wrote:
> I see, by count, that there are now 1 genuine forran postings per 3
> pages of titles. At 30 odd titles per page, that makes it close to a
> 99% spam proportion.Anybody know how something can be done?
> Or where to report in Google? Where I've never ever seen a reply in
> the Help Forum?
> Repeat: some readers cannot have a censored effective "newsreader"
> solution.

Spam counts were very low till October 17th of 2009. I believe, but
cannot confirm, that Google stopped its spam-suppression in this
group
on the next day, and has not turned it back on. I have no idea why,
and there is no tech support contact for Google Groups. The help
mailing list sometimes draws responses from Google, but never for
Usenet issues. It is probably an accident, but I can't think how
to get it corrected unless someone at Google, or with contacts
there can get in touch with someone with authority at Google
Groups. Since there are probably very few fortran users at Google,
this may be a long wait.

Daniel Feenberg
From: Gordon Sande on
On 2010-04-11 05:41:48 -0300, Terence <tbwright(a)cantv.net> said:

> I see, by count, that there are now 1 genuine forran postings per 3
> pages of titles. At 30 odd titles per page, that makes it close to a
> 99% spam proportion.Anybody know how something can be done?
> Or where to report in Google? Where I've never ever seen a reply in
> the Help Forum?
> Repeat: some readers cannot have a censored effective "newsreader"
> solution.

Being curious I had my newsreader reload all of the posting in c.l.f
that were still available. They go back to December. I had expected
only a couple weeks.

Anyway, there were 2420 postings. I used the sort by poster and scanned
by hand. The blocks of drug ads stood out so I marked then as read.
Real postings came in blocks so I only had to look at the boundaries.
Repeated this a couple more times and got down to 2018 postings. So
about 1/6 were spam which mostly comes in batches of around 20. And
there were still a few bogus conferences and posting from a few folks
who I skip over.

I also noticed that Terrance had about two dozen postings and fully
1/3 had spam in their title.

My observation is that a real news service seems to not have that
much spam. The spam that arrives in batches is easy to spot. The small
amount remaining is not a burden and quite comparable to the Ada flame
wars and other newsgroup noise. A real newsreader makes it easy to skip
over the spam and noise that remains.

My lesson is to avoid Google and hope that the folks who complain about
it would stop cluttering up the newsgroups. A real news service with a
real newsreader seems to solve the problem. And yes I have taken the bait
and am contributing to the problem.




From: Tom Micevski on
Terence wrote:
> I see, by count, that there are now 1 genuine forran postings per 3
> pages of titles. At 30 odd titles per page, that makes it close to a
> 99% spam proportion.Anybody know how something can be done?
> Or where to report in Google? Where I've never ever seen a reply in
> the Help Forum?
> Repeat: some readers cannot have a censored effective "newsreader"
> solution.

since you can't/wont use a proper newsreader with a "cleaner" feed, i
think that you just have to put up with it - google don't seem willing
to stop the spam.
From: A Watcher on
Terence wrote:
> I see, by count, that there are now 1 genuine forran postings per 3
> pages of titles. At 30 odd titles per page, that makes it close to a
> 99% spam proportion.Anybody know how something can be done?
> Or where to report in Google? Where I've never ever seen a reply in
> the Help Forum?
> Repeat: some readers cannot have a censored effective "newsreader"
> solution.

I use filters with my newsreader so I don't see most of the spam. It is
still a problem, though, as someone new to usenet will not know how to
do this and probably wouldn't try figure it out.