Re: can we fight the spam?

William Elliot wrote:
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:

george wrote:
Is there any mode or channel of effective complaint to google
about the spam here? I have been reporting/complaining
about individual messages but I am 1 person and am getting
ignored.
Hi George,

I wrote a program that is collecting the spams coming through
googlegroups, and then it posts them through the abuse report interface on:
http://groups.google.com/support/bin/request.py?page=&contact_type=abuse_legal_iss

and I'm not sure if it does any good. I don't know if they're replying
to those reports because I put the spammer's email address in the report.

If you'd like I'll post each complaint with your e-mail address, then at
least on your behalf will have been sent around 1000 complaints.

Ross, for many like OP, I'd like to put together a report on what news
servers and what news readers are needed and where to find them, so they
can set themselves up with a functional news group interface that will
allow them to filter out spam, keyword by keyword, or like more and more
who are fed up with Google groups, simply block all posts from Google
groups. Are you willing to help?

----

I don't know if a keyword block would work because some of the spams are innocuous in the vocabulary.

I was surprised to find the other day that there are as many regular posters to sci.math as spammers that use Google groups to post. So, blocking all Google groups posts would inconvenience the many regular posters who use those, and their readers.

A large amount of effort goes into controlling spam on usenet already. While that may be so, and it is largely effective and justified and no important political messages are censored, as far as I know, only junk porn and cheap goods and schemes marketing spam, the threat of false positives is a key concern in the liberal and by default permissive attitude towards classification as spam.

The spammers out of Google groups have wreaked spam devastation over on the unmoderated groups of Google's non-usenet groups.

If Google blocked out spammers, determined by some natural analysis on how their posts were off-topic and nonspecialized, that would solve the problem of spam from Google groups (until spammers went on-topic, shudder). Where Google groups won't delete (cancel) posts through their domain, many other usenet servers will, but Google takes no action on them.

I think Google will eventually take action because there is the thread of "Usenet Death Penalty" as UUnet got in the 90's, for not doing something about spam.

You might find more sharing your views on http://improve-usenet.org/ . I think that it would be better to get Google groups to control spam than to give up usenet groups to the spammers.

Now I have just sent 1000 complaints to Google groups about the spams, Google's representatives said in an article of March 11 that they were working on a way to control the spam.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=information+week+google+spam

So, this too shall pass.

Ross
.

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