Google groups spam

[redst...@gmail.com]

The last 5 out of 10 threads on this group have been spam, so I thought I'd post this link:

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9792297?hl=en

Summary:

• Anyone can mark spam, and it (presumably) helps Google filters. "Content you mark as spam is hidden from your view. It isn’t hidden for other group members, however. "
• Moderators can delete spam from the group. Martin, are there others besides you who are moderators? If so, it'd be great if one or two such folks volunteer to delete  spam. I'm happy to do so, though someone who checks this group more frequently and regularly would be a better fit.
  

[Bman Q]

+1 to this and kudos to Red for taking action / creating thread.

I mark spam when i see it, but Red is right that ideally someone beside Martin should have ability to delete it.

[Jason Chu]

I wouldn't mind being a moderator, this list is pretty low traffic. I wonder if Martin would be open to having additional moderators.

I also wonder if forcing non-members to go through moderation directly (i.e. making someone approve their emails) would help limit the spam on this list. If someone really needs to post on the list who isn't a spammer, they could always join the group first.

Thoughts?

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[Martin Blais]

I don't mind but IMHO it hasn't been too bad

There's a lot that gets caught... Everyday

[Bman Q]

2 weeks ago i thought about starting same thread cause top 5 threads were spam,

i personally don't mind cause i am already beancount user / fan,

but if it's newbie person considering trying beancount it produces poor first impression.

[Bman Q]

UPDATE actually i do mind a bit, Martin created great product,

so let's keep our "forum" clean (on proper level) as well. Since it's a place for us to come and ask / help / share.

[redst...@gmail.com]

Hmm, nice idea, but it might be a bit unfriendly to new users IMHO. Personally, my annoyance comes from scrolling through the list and seeing spam. The "small hammer" would be to simply delete those threads, which is very little work. My suspicion is, nothing more will be needed. So we could start with that and see how that works. WDYT?

Thanks for volunteering, BTW. Martin, would you be okay granting mod to xen?

[Martin Blais]

I can probably just go through the archives regularly and clean that up, it's not a big deal.

Let me have a look now

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/177fabc0-b847-4cbe-b704-a7c9d1580615n%40googlegroups.com.

[Martin Blais]

I marked 10 as spam, seems to have started 6 months ago.

I'll try to keep an eye out for those

[redst...@gmail.com]

Ah, much better already, thank you a bunch!

[redst...@gmail.com]

Hi Martin or anyone else with privileges: deleting the spam in the top 20 threads would be awesome. Unless I'm reading it wrong and Berlusconi has indeed taken up plain text accounting.

[Simon Michael]

On 2/21/22 12:12 PM, redst...@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi Martin or anyone else with privileges: deleting the spam in the top
> 20 threads would be awesome. Unless I'm reading it wrong and Berlusconi
> has indeed taken up plain text accounting.

I have been catching up on discussion here. I read via NNTP (Thunderbird
+ news.gmane.io) and the spam is quite annoying.

[Daniele Nicolodi]

I never used Thunderbird for reading a newsgroup, but news clients
usually have a function to mark messages as "deleted". Marking ad dozen
or so messages takes a fraction of a second.

The Beancount mailing list is hosted on Google Groups. If you perceive
the spam problem as so important, why don't you bring the problem up
with Google? They are the only one that can do something to improve the
spam filtering.

I don't think that asking the Beancount maintainers to manually moderate
the list in the limited amount of time they can dedicate to Beancount is
a sensible thing to do.

Cheers,
Dan

[Simon Michael]

Hi Dan,

I'm sorry that the first time I post anything here in years, it sounds
like a complaint! And here comes a reply that might sound suspiciously
like a rant! :)

Let me try to correct: please don't take it as a complaint, and I'm not
asking anything of anyone. I simply mean to contribute a data point to
this discussion: the spam is actually still a problem, for at least this
subscriber.

Here are more details. I have a new resolution to keep up with the great
discussion here. I'm working through the archives, and I also check for
new posts daily. The last week or two, most days I've seen nothing but
one or more new posts from the same spammer. To mark them read in
Thunderbird is tedious, not very quick - you must give TB time because
of some bug - and hard to do without seeing a screenful of the spammer's
rant.

(Someone here might want to say, give up Thunderbird/NNTP. I understand,
but please don't; newsreader + gmane archives are a fantastic power tool
for browsing mail lists. If you have a realistic replacement newsreader
in mind, I'll listen.)

I don't subscribe to any other that delivers spam to me on a regular
basis, though I can understand the desire to keep participation barriers
low. If the list wants to live with it, I'll figure out some solution on
my end.

Apologies, best wishes :)
-Simon

[Simon Michael]

PS a little more context, since it's hard to visualise other people's
problems: I have several thousand unread old messages that I'm working
through, so it's not yet simply a matter of "mark all read" in the
beancount group.

And a bit about google group setiup: the hledger list, and ledger list
presumably, are configured differently to avoid this problem. I don't
remember all details but I seem to have

- Message moderation: moderate messages from non-members
- New member restrictions: no posting restriction for new members
- Spam message handling: moderate and notify content moderators

and I get an occasional admin mail from google about something
questionable in the queue - it's very easy to handle and if it wasn't
I'd invite more list managers.

In case it's helpful..

[redst...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 8:19:26 PM UTC-8 si...@joyful.com wrote:

> I don't subscribe to any other that delivers spam to me on a regular
> basis, though I can understand the desire to keep participation barriers
> low. If the list wants to live with it, I'll figure out some solution on
> my end.

Ditto for me. Especially when using gmane, but also on the Google Groups interface. I'm not sure what it is about this particular list that invites spam.

FWIW, your post didn't come across like a complaint or an ask at all, to me at least. The spam is an annoyance to many regular users, I imagine, myself included. To new users, the list might give an impression of an unmaintained wasteland upon an initial cursory look.

 

- Message moderation: moderate messages from non-members
- New member restrictions: no posting restriction for new members
- Spam message handling: moderate and notify content moderators

and I get an occasional admin mail from google about something
questionable in the queue - it's very easy to handle and if it wasn't
I'd invite more list managers.

Thanks for sharing your experience, it's good to know moderation is low effort. Jason Chu above suggested similar settings as well (in addition to kindly volunteering to moderate), and now, I do see the value of it.

Martin, perhaps the continuing and possibly increasing spam is a good reason to reconsider changing to the settings above that Simon and Jason suggested? And if Jason is still up for it, taking him up on his offer to handle non-member moderation?

[Alan H]

I didn't realise that the voting something as spam was for me only :-) However - if you read on the google.com interface *do* take a moment to mark spam you see. It will help reduce it over the short term too.

I like the idea of someone deleting spam posts and I'm also ok with the list only being open to subscribers (for posting) I'm not sure that would reduce the participation significantly and it would likely dent the spam.

Thoughts?

Alan

[Simon Michael]

On 2/23/22 4:49 AM, Alan H wrote:
> I'm also ok with the
> list only being open to subscribers (for posting) I'm not sure that
> would reduce the participation significantly and it would likely dent
> the spam.
> Thoughts?

You don't have to reject non-subscribers' messages entirely; you can
have them be moderated. (And when approving such a message, you can mark
that sender as always approved for the future, even as a non-subscriber,
IIRC.)

[Jason Chu]

I am curious how many non-subscribers we have sending email to the ML. Are we trying to optimize for a situation that doesn't actually exist, thus causing a worse experience for all subscribers?

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[Hawrylyshen, Alan]

I think Simon's suggestion is a good idea - we don't miss anything except for some possible delay and most of us will not get spam. Jason's point around optimising for no threat is a good one too.

I'm in favour of setting non-members to moderated with a few folks willing to check the queue regularly - I'm on that list (I'd volunteer to check) but I don't have the established credentials that someone like Red or Martin (or most of you) have.

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a l a n a t p o l y p h a s e d o t c a

[Martin Blais]

I don't know what all the fuss is about, I see 3 or 4 spam messages since October.

They're gone.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAB5fSsosAbpMP0CmG4%3D1dKPVty%2Bu5L51bCM2_N8wO2M8AjY6iA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Chu]

I counted 15 in my spam folder, inbox, and trash in that same time period.

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/L2kishqjKbA

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/x1Abp2dor84

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/DlGNSf0WE9I

Are still in the archive.

I think the deal is that some people don't like seeing spam from a mailing list that has otherwise high quality posts. My Gmail misclassified legitimate emails from this list as spam and I don't want to mark any of the actual spam I receive from it in case that starts marking other legitimate posts as spam for other people.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhOtg2W51ep6ovrw0OvOc1rnhx9FzG_vqsjsCqOwSRbdhA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Martin Blais]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 8:07 PM Jason Chu <xen...@gmail.com> wrote:

I counted 15 in my spam folder, inbox, and trash in that same time period.

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/L2kishqjKbA

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/x1Abp2dor84

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/DlGNSf0WE9I

Are still in the archive.

Those are borderline spam; it looks to me like an advertisement for accounting-related things. I deleted 3/4 of those and kept one.

As for the others, I deleted a bunch sometime last year.

 

I think the deal is that some people don't like seeing spam from a mailing list that has otherwise high quality posts. My Gmail misclassified legitimate emails from this list as spam and I don't want to mark any of the actual spam I receive from it in case that starts marking other legitimate posts as spam for other people.

Look I'm with you I just don't think it's that terrible we get ~10 spammy messages on the list / year and that I lag a few months in deleting them from the archive.

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAFFHUgv%2Bg6DXsxGzAAFnktApdVtpW7b-%2Buacai%3D%2BvBGXHB0OGg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Chu]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 5:45 PM Martin Blais <bl...@furius.ca> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 8:07 PM Jason Chu <xen...@gmail.com> wrote:

I counted 15 in my spam folder, inbox, and trash in that same time period.

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/L2kishqjKbA

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/x1Abp2dor84

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/DlGNSf0WE9I

Are still in the archive.

Those are borderline spam; it looks to me like an advertisement for accounting-related things. I deleted 3/4 of those and kept one.

As for the others, I deleted a bunch sometime last year.

 

I think the deal is that some people don't like seeing spam from a mailing list that has otherwise high quality posts. My Gmail misclassified legitimate emails from this list as spam and I don't want to mark any of the actual spam I receive from it in case that starts marking other legitimate posts as spam for other people.

Look I'm with you I just don't think it's that terrible we get ~10 spammy messages on the list / year and that I lag a few months in deleting them from the archive.

I think it's less about impact on any individual and instead about sharing the impact with everyone who receives emails from the list. Each of them also has to make a choice about what to do with those emails. That's why we're suggesting a moderation for non-subscribers (with blanket approval after the initial email) so only moderators have to worry about cleaning up emails, not having them in the archives at all, and not bothering everyone else with them.

My days of being able to submit patches for things are pretty limited, but my ability to check a moderation queue for (very occasional) spam is doable.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhPec-_G%3DbW5yAPXNDC%2BbLHZFTTcOFEh%2Bs6EiqCX%3DKDuNw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Simon Michael]

On 2/23/22 3:45 PM, Martin Blais wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 8:07 PM Jason Chu <xen...@gmail.com
> <mailto:xen...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I counted 15 in my spam folder, inbox, and trash in that same time
> period.
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/L2kishqjKbA

> <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/L2kishqjKbA>
> https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/x1Abp2dor84
> <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/x1Abp2dor84>
> https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/DlGNSf0WE9I

> <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/DlGNSf0WE9I>
>
> Are still in the archive.
>
>
> Those are borderline spam; it looks to me like an advertisement for
> accounting-related things. I deleted 3/4 of those and kept one.
>
> As for the others, I deleted a bunch sometime last year.
>
>
> I think the deal is that some people don't like seeing spam from a
> mailing list that has otherwise high quality posts. My Gmail
> misclassified legitimate emails from this list as spam and I don't
> want to mark any of the actual spam I receive from it in case that
> starts marking other legitimate posts as spam for other people.
>
>
> Look I'm with you I just don't think it's that terrible we get ~10
> spammy messages on the list / year and that I lag a few months in
> deleting them from the archive.

Hi Martin,

There have been 12 in the last two weeks, all of the same type: 30K of
ranting in italian. I'm sure if I read italian they'd be quite offensive.

[Simon Michael]

Attached below FYI, hopefully that doesn't get me flagged. These remain
in places like the gmane NNTP archive even if you delete them after the
fact in google's UI. Better not to let them enter in the first place
IMHO, but it's your call.

[Martin Blais]

I'm seeing none of that. I deleted one earlier, and I'm looking through the archive

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount

and I can't see what you're talking about. I really can't. I'm not getting these emails.

I see some in my Spam folder, but they don't show up in the archive, and they nearly all get caught as spam.

 

[Martin Blais]

Man nntp so old school.

I've changed it from

to this:

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[Simon Michael]

On 2/23/22 6:17 PM, Martin Blais wrote:
> I've changed it from

Great! I think that will solve the problem.

FYI, I think moderating new member posts is unnecessary for now (until
you get spammers actually joining the list); you could reduce a bit of
moderation work by leaving it off.

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 11:10:59PM -0500, Martin Blais wrote:
> I'm seeing none of that. I deleted one earlier, and I'm looking
> through the archive https://groups.google.com/g/beancount and I can't
> see what you're talking about. I really can't. I'm not getting these
> emails.

I've received all of those as well, and I presume that's also what
everyone else who's complaining is complaining about, because they have
increased a lot in the last few weeks (in the past it was 1 every couple
of months or so). It's reasonable that those messages are less likely to
trigger my spam filter than yours, as I routinely receive legitimate
messages in Italian, but this still doesn't explain why they do not show
up in the group archive. (Unless google groups apply some personalized
SPAM filtering based on the user that visits the archive? I have no
better explanation.) Very weird.

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Co-founder & CTO Software Heritage o o o o /\|^|/\
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director '" V "'

[redst...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, February 23, 2022 at 10:53:07 PM UTC-8 Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

I've received all of those as well, and I presume that's also what
everyone else who's complaining is complaining about, because they have
increased a lot in the last few weeks (in the past it was 1 every couple
of months or so). It's reasonable that those messages are less likely to
trigger my spam filter than yours, as I routinely receive legitimate
messages in Italian, but this still doesn't explain why they do not show
up in the group archive. (Unless google groups apply some personalized
SPAM filtering based on the user that visits the archive? I have no
better explanation.) Very weird.

Messages in the google groups archive can be deleted from the archive any time after they arrive, which is a request I'd made earlier in this thread when spam was starting to be annoying but still rare, and which Martin did. That's why you aren't seeing them here.

However, that means they still get through to email inboxes, and the gmane archive. How bad the problem is for each individual I'm guessing depends on their email server's spam filtering, their risk of training their spam filter incorrectly, their NNTP client if that's used (I use one too), and of late, apparently whether or not they receive legitimate email in Italian! Given these factors, I can see why some folks are wondering what all the fuss is about, while others are frustrated with the nuisance this has been. See my attached NNTP reader screenshot from earlier today if you're in the former camp and are curious.

Martin - thanks for the change! Thanks to everyone for weighing in and offering to help!

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 11:51:53PM -0800, redst...@gmail.com wrote:
> Messages in the google groups archive can be deleted from the archive any
> time after they arrive, which is a request I'd made earlier in this thread
> when spam was starting to be annoying but still rare, and which Martin did.
> That's why you aren't seeing them here.

I am aware of this process, but I don't think that's the reason here.
Martin reported having deleted only one and not having seen any other
similar messages; others (including myself) have seen dozens.

[redst...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 1:16:37 AM UTC-8 Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 11:51:53PM -0800, redst...@gmail.com wrote:
> Messages in the google groups archive can be deleted from the archive any
> time after they arrive, which is a request I'd made earlier in this thread
> when spam was starting to be annoying but still rare, and which Martin did.
> That's why you aren't seeing them here.

I am aware of this process, but I don't think that's the reason here.
Martin reported having deleted only one and not having seen any other
similar messages; others (including myself) have seen dozens.

Sorry I missed your question previously. You're right, and I don't have an explanation for that discrepancy either.

Though that discrepancy does help explain the differences of opinion in this thread even more :).

That said, with the new settings, I hope to return to the good old days of explaining how to transfer assets held at cost across accounts for the n'th time soon :).