help save comp.lang.lisp from spam
Xah Lee
let's help save it. Regardless what newsgroup readers you use, when
you do your daily newsgroup reading, please take 15 seconds to go to:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/topics
then, click on the “Report as spam” for the 10 spam posts that shows
on the first page.
Thanks.
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄
namekuseijin
good idea, man. Let's kick this lucius Starnus ass...
Captain Obvious
I'm reading it on news.sunsite.dk, there is relatively little spam there
(except that recent "lucius Starnes" outbreak), probably they do some spam
filtering...
Just saying.
D Herring
Similar story here. But taking a couple minutes a day might make this
better for the rest of the world.
Worth a shot.
- Daniel
Alan Malloy
I think it's just Google Groups that is 95% spam. Like other posters,
aside from the recent Lucius problem, I see very little spam. Reporting
things as spam to Google won't help any of the posters who aren't using
Google (and I bet there are a lot, in a programming group). So feel free
to report spam, of course, but a more productive course might be to try
out a news server that does more reliable filtering, if you're having
serious, persistent problems on Google.
--
Cheers,
Alan (San Jose, California, USA)
o.ja...@gmail.com
D Herring
> http://www.lispforum.com doesn't seem that affected by spam. (Perhaps
> due to first post moderated)
The first post is moderated -- that eliminates most spammers.
All subsequent posts are monitored; a user who began spamming would be
stopped.
Unmoderated usenet groups such as cll cannot rely on moderation.
- Daniel
Francogrex
> today, comp.lang.lisp is 95% spam.
> let's help save it. Regardless what newsgroup readers you use, when
> you do your daily newsgroup reading, please take 15 seconds to go to:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/topics
>
> then, click on the “Report as spam” for the 10 spam posts that shows
> on the first page.
It's useless; Google doesn't do anything significant to stop the spam.
This is evident from the fact that I and others have been reporting
those for a very long time and I even sent emails to google staff
about it long time ago but they didn't do anything to stop it, the
problem wasn't solved and if anything, it has gotten worse.
Tim X
The distributed architecture of NNTP and the different ways people
access it means that no single 'centralised' anti-spam solution can
possibly work. Individual news providers can improve the situation a
little through filtering, but at best that will only help those
subscribed to their feed and it is difficult to get the balance right.
I'd rather see some spam than not see some non-spam articles with
genuine content.
Using a decent news reader and a higher quality subscription service
generally provides a good result. If your using a free news service,
then you will likely get more spam and should not be surprised about it.
If your not using a news reader that allows you to somehow weight
articles based on author name and subject, your just simply crazy and
probably deserve lots of spam for using crap tools.
Tim
--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
Norbert_Paul
> Francogrex<fra...@grex.org> writes:
> possibly work. Individual news providers can improve the situation a
> little through filtering, but at best that will only help those
> subscribed to their feed and it is difficult to get the balance right.
> I'd rather see some spam than not see some non-spam articles with
> genuine content.
perfect) filtering.
> Using a decent news reader and a higher quality subscription service
> generally provides a good result. If your using a free news service,
> then you will likely get more spam and should not be surprised about it.
> If your not using a news reader that allows you to somehow weight
> articles based on author name and subject, your just simply crazy and
> probably deserve lots of spam for using crap tools.
Is there a client-side spam filter for news? I am using Iceape as news
reader, but it only has spam filtering for E-Mails which doesn't work
for news.
Norbert
Mirko
incf
Tim X
Some news readers do have various facilities for handling spam in
newsgroups. I don't know of any system that works independently of or is
agnostic about the news reader. If iceape doesn't have anything, you
will likely need to a different news reader.
One way you can filter independently of the client reader is to setup
your own NNTP 'suck' feed and filter that feed yourself - quite a lot of
owrk and would need a fair amount of maintenance. Not really worth it
unless your a really heavy NNTP user and monitor lots of groups.
o.ja...@gmail.com
spam free for free, without a newsreader. And not requiring a
newsreader makes it more accessible to newbies aswel.
D Herring
a) both of those are moderated
b) each requires a separate account, and neither works with a newsreader
c) noobs preferring web-based systems is a generational trend
d) it would be nice if there were a clean way to aggregate the web
forums -- aggregation was a prime motivation for usenet after all
- Daniel
Pascal J. Bourguignon
Don't worry, when they'll have to give a name/password for then 101th
time, even the newbie generation will eventuall be fed up and will
reinvent usenet. Of course, it will be much more complex, XML-based,
and require a massively parallel supercomputer to run at acceptable
speed. Nonetheless, they're bound to reinvent it.
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__
Raffael Cavallaro
Where "it" is a lisp forum that is not frequented by many of the
posters for whose views I read c.l.l
IOW, lispforum may be newbie friendly, but the disucssion there is, in
general, far less interesting than the discussion here.
--
Raffael Cavallaro
Tim X
You forgot to mention it will use SOAP, RPC and a plugin for facebook as
well as provide a twitter interface!
Rupert Swarbrick
writes:
> IOW, lispforum may be newbie friendly, but the disucssion there is, in
> general, far less interesting than the discussion here.
There might be a connection there...
Juanjo
> On Apr 23, 6:07 pm, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > then, click on the “Report as spam” for the 10 spam posts that shows
> > on the first page.
>
> It's useless; Google doesn't do anything significant to stop the spam.
> This is evident from the fact that I and others have been reporting
> those for a very long time and I even sent emails to google staff
I have noticed the following: if I click on a "report spam" link, the
RSS view of the group contains less spam. Today I came here and out of
the 10 spam messages in the front page of Google Groups only three
were in my RSS view in Google Reader. Coincidence? Probably not.
Xah Lee
wrote:
> > > then, click on the “Report as spam” for the 10 spam posts that shows
> > > on the first page.
>
> > It's useless; Google doesn't do anything significant to stop the spam.
> > This is evident from the fact that I and others have been reporting
> > those for a very long time and I even sent emails to google staff
>
> I have noticed the following: if I click on a "report spam" link, the
> RSS view of the group contains less spam. Today I came here and out of
> the 10 spam messages in the front page of Google Groups only three
> were in my RSS view in Google Reader. Coincidence? Probably not.
yes i agree that google care, and do something about this.
The click spam feature was added recently, perhaps 6 months ago, that
indicates they do care, even if it is not that effective.
also, how effective it is depends of course on how many people report
spam. For groups like comp.lang.lisp, many are old timers, don't use
google, and the readership is already comparatively very small. So, it
can get worse.
another thing might be interesting is that the spam rate seems to
depends on the newsgroup too. For example, comp.lang.lisp is now 95%
spam, but however, comp.lang.python gets almost no spam at least as
shown in google group. This probably has to do with number of users,
and also that comp.lang.python is mirrored with python's mailing list.
technology marches on by changing needs. In the 1990s or before,
newsgroup is effectively the only medium and technology of subject
oriented online forum. (besides a few commercial ones, e.g.
CompuServe) Thru the years since 1990s which i personally lived thru,
other tech of communication came into being that became widely
adopted, roughly in chronological order: mailing lists, irc, faq-o-
matic (a pre-cursor to wiki), Instant messaging, blogs, wiki, social
network sites, youtube, twitter, and today much of these are all
intermingled and inter-connected. For example, much sites that do any
type of communication often has mailing list, web feed (rss/atom), web
interface, instant messaging, all together as one integrated
technology, not as much as independent technologies. (e.g. facebook,
much of google's many services) Voice and video chat and conferencing
is today almost everywhere too.
One point i would like to note that is, if google didn't provide the
newsgroup service in 2001 (or the dejanews didn't start it), newsgroup
might have gone the ways of dinosaur, much like many unix net tech
such as who, talk, finger, gopher.
some wikipedia link for those curious
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejanews
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄
Tim Bradshaw
> yes i agree that google care, and do something about this.
The problem, really, is whether google do anything (or *can* do
anything) which helps people who do not use google groups as their
access mechanism. Unless they do/can then there's no real incentive for
people who do not use google groups to read news to paricipate in their
anti-spam stuff (especially as several other public servers provide
radically better spam filtering already).
I don't know how spam is dealt with in newsgroups nowadays. I remember
when it started the approach was that people would post cancel messages
and these would propagate and nuke the spam.
Something like that ought still to work, I think, though you'd want the
cancel messages to be somehow signed so you could tell where they came
from, to prevent the bad guys cancelling everything.
Does anyone know if google do anything like that (or maintain any kind
of system which is usable by other people?).
--tim
o.ja...@gmail.com
should be.. (Sylpheed, not entirely happy with its interface..)
With RSS one could just pop in the URL and it will find the
appropriate .rss file. There should be a standard to do the same to
find the name of a newsgroup.(you see on the web with interfaces like
this) Of course, you need to also find some usenet server..
I agree though, i don't like all this use of 'web stuff' used where
our own computer is perfectly capable of doing it. The problem is that
doing it on a web interface can get you advertising benefits and such,
and installing stuff on ones own computer can be trickier, or even
prohibited by an employer..
Ross Lonstein
> p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) writes:
[snip]
>> Don't worry, when they'll have to give a name/password for then 101th
>> time, even the newbie generation will eventuall be fed up and will
>> reinvent usenet. Of course, it will be much more complex, XML-based,
>> and require a massively parallel supercomputer to run at acceptable
>> speed. Nonetheless, they're bound to reinvent it.
>
> You forgot to mention it will use SOAP, RPC and a plugin for facebook as
> well as provide a twitter interface!
[snip]
And this time, the revolution will be monetized.
- Ross