A small change to combat spam

[Mid-America Electric Automobile Association]

Anyone else sick of getting their ducts cleaned?

Quick summary: I'm changing the settings of this group from "Anyone on the web can join" to "Anyone on the web can ask to join". If you're reading this message, you're already a member and this won't affect you. Read on for details.

We discussed the recent rise in spam in this Google Group on Sunday. It's a challenge to balance openness - we want anyone to be able to ask questions or share news about EVs with minimal barriers - with blocking spam. I'm set as a Group Owner so I can ban an email address (which I have, immediately, each time we get these spam posts about cleaning your dryer vents), but that doesn't stop anyone from just hitting it again with a new email address.

The current settings are shown below: Anyone can find the group, anyone can join the group with a Google account and a click, and anyone who has joined the group (members) can post anything they want.

I'm changing the setting for "Who can join group" to "Anyone on the web can ask", so there's one extra step before being able to post. I think this should email all the Group Owners (currently myself, Billy Croan, Leanne Wiedemann, and George Hoech) letting us know to check the "Pending" list on the Group, though we'll see how that goes. I intend to approve anyone who asks to join without a "background check" - so someone could still ask to join and then post spam, but my hope is that it'll reduce that.

We don't want to have to enable moderation, because I worry that'll end up with someone posting about a Sunday meeting an hour beforehand and nobody sees it to approve it until too late. There is a setting for "new member posts are moderated" that we could try if it continues to be a problem. I don't think there's so much chitchat in this group that it would be overwhelming to moderate, but I also don't want someone trying to get or share information and their post gets lost in the moderation list.

If anyone has further thoughts, or if anyone else wants to be made an Owner or Manager, let me know.

--Cameron Schwanke

[Billy Croan]

Good call Cameron!

One thing to remember about spam is it's not typically a person sending it. It's a bot. 

Bots are software written by people of course, but they're written to be just smart enough to be effective. 

It's not worth the time to make a bot more clever than it needs to be to mostly accomplish its goal.  So even the small extra step will significantly reduce spam.  

If we ever got to the point that like somebody was joining every week, I would probably ride a bot of my own to automatically do a Google search of the email address attempting to join and present the results. Because a human email address is going to have some references somewhere on the Internet to it.

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[Jim Donovan]

Thanks Cameron.

Jim

On Jan 15, 2026, at 2:16 PM, Mid-America Electric Automobile Association <ma...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Anyone else sick of getting their ducts cleaned?

Quick summary: I'm changing the settings of this group from "Anyone on the web can join" to "Anyone on the web can ask to join". If you're reading this message, you're already a member and this won't affect you. Read on for details.

We discussed the recent rise in spam in this Google Group on Sunday. It's a challenge to balance openness - we want anyone to be able to ask questions or share news about EVs with minimal barriers - with blocking spam. I'm set as a Group Owner so I can ban an email address (which I have, immediately, each time we get these spam posts about cleaning your dryer vents), but that doesn't stop anyone from just hitting it again with a new email address.

The current settings are shown below: Anyone can find the group, anyone can join the group with a Google account and a click, and anyone who has joined the group (members) can post anything they want.

<Screenshot 2026-01-15 135516.jpg>

I'm changing the setting for "Who can join group" to "Anyone on the web can ask", so there's one extra step before being able to post. I think this should email all the Group Owners (currently myself, Billy Croan, Leanne Wiedemann, and George Hoech) letting us know to check the "Pending" list on the Group, though we'll see how that goes. I intend to approve anyone who asks to join without a "background check" - so someone could still ask to join and then post spam, but my hope is that it'll reduce that.

We don't want to have to enable moderation, because I worry that'll end up with someone posting about a Sunday meeting an hour beforehand and nobody sees it to approve it until too late. There is a setting for "new member posts are moderated" that we could try if it continues to be a problem. I don't think there's so much chitchat in this group that it would be overwhelming to moderate, but I also don't want someone trying to get or share information and their post gets lost in the moderation list.

If anyone has further thoughts, or if anyone else wants to be made an Owner or Manager, let me know.

--Cameron Schwanke

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<Screenshot 2026-01-15 135516.jpg>

[Paradigm Design]

Hear hear Cameron!  Good choice on formatting the settings.

My duct solution?  Tore them out with the furnace, insulated heavily, installed a high efficiency wood stove, and built an attached solar greenhouse.  

Michael