Help getting in touch with Google Group owners of Mozilla Dev Platform archive to clean up spam

[Noah Sumo]

Hey everyone,

Longtime member of Mozilla here via SUMO. I came across the old Mozilla Dev Platform archive (https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform) a few weeks ago & found a shocking amount of spam. Numbering in the thousands. I know Google Groups seem to be a huge target for spam but thankfully it stopped in that group.

I was wondering is it possible to made a temporary moderator for that archive so I can attempt a cleanup in my spare time. I don't wish to ask anyone to do it on my behalf because it is simply too repetitive since Google requires tons of clicks to get it done & only lets you view 30 entries per page. I plan to tackle as much of it as I can mentally handle over the summer months. I think I can get it done in a few weeks once I get a good flow going. I reported 143 pages worth of posts (4261–4290 of 211,360) as spam but I'm not sure if Google will actually delete them.

I estimate ~50,000+ spam posts ranging from drugs, cocaine, crack, adderall, Ritalin, Bitcoin & tons of foreign language spam. Seems to have started in April 2023 & ended on Feb 22, 2024. And I just hate to see y'alls dev work go out that way.

So if anyone knows who I should be talking to about this, please let me know while I still have the energy to get started on this.

I know its not the best use of anyone's time but if the spam can actually be deleted & not return, I feel like it would be cleaning off the graffiti on that archive. Thanks

[Nick Alexander]

Hi Noah,

Thanks for your interesting offer.  I didn't want you to get no response, so here I am.  I'll try to run down an owner and see if it's reasonablet o get you some level of administrative access.

Thanks again!

Nick

[Noah Sumo]

Awesome, thanks Nick. I realize its not the easiest task to track down the owner of stuff like this. But I thought if I asked sooner than later there would be a higher chance to clean up that group. Doing it years from now, it'll be much hard to track down the owners of that group so I appreciate your efforts. You're welcome, I just hope it doesn't feel as daunting as it looks once I get started haha