Re: What to do about off-topic spam?

On Sep 6, 2:14 pm, Oleg Lego <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:13:24 -0700, Shannon Jacobs posted:

On Sep 5, 9:23 pm, Peter Moylan <pe...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 05/09/07 14:39, Shannon Jacobs wrote:
<snip>

That's how your response began. Then you attempted to hack and cut
some sort of mangled meaning out of my comments in a form that you
found more suitable for some sort of flame war or dharma battle. I am
not interested.

You only raised one moderately interesting new point, the utility of
newsreaders ('classic' NNTP clients) versus the Google Groups
interface. However, your post itself was mostly an example of how
newsreaders can be used to mangle the discussion and render it
incomprehensible. I do have around 40 years of experience with this
stuff, so I feel I was able to reconstruct most of your mental models,
even though you presented them so poorly. Sorry to inform you, but
most normal people of my acquaintance would have had no idea what you
were mumbling about.

In substantive response, I do have extensive experience with NNTP
client software, and my belief is that NNTP has been hopelessly
overwhelmed by perpetual September. Even filtering and killfiles are
meaningless given an infinite supply of new noise that needs to be
filtered and new spammers worthy of the killfile. I suggest that it is
better to cut them off at the point of their motivation to spam, I
believe Google has a tool of sufficient power to have a large impact
on the spammers, and I have submitted a suggestion for an algorithm
that might improve the situation.

With regards to the OP of this thread, I deliberately selected that
topic because it was very clearly spam for this newsgroup. Actually,
even in this case, with a trivial introduction the spammer could have
made it a controversial question. For example, the spammer could have
started by saying "I have written the following article and I'm
concerned about the accuracy of my usage of English. Do you have any
feedback or suggestions to improve my English?" I'd still dismiss it
as a transparent and lying stratagem, and I wouldn't waste my time
trying to "help" the person, but at least that would have included a
claim of relevance. As it stood, the article was nothing but noisy
spam in this context.

I would love to see newsgroups inundated with a flood of common sense
and politeness and useful information. Doesn't seem too likely, does
it?

Do you [not limited to Mr. Lego] have any constructive suggestions? Or
are you just another part of the problem.

Let me close by reviewing the suggestion I have offered. Newsgroup
spammers seek free publicity. I suggest that cutting off their free
publicity as quickly as possible would demotivate them. I suggest that
Google groups could treat credible complaints as grounds for immediate
blockage of the free publicity.

(I still think that most spam deserves permanent deletion after a more
leisurely check, but if you disagree, then the obvious constructive
suggestion would be a user setting to allow people to insist on seeing
the spam, too. Google Groups could even add more complicated systems
like some of the spam-scoring systems used by certain NNTP clients. I
just don't see that programming effort as providing sufficient RoI.)

Google has a very unusual position with substantial leverage to
improve the newsgroups. Right now Google takes the position that they
don't care. Do you care? Do you think Google should care? Maybe if
Google sees enough interest from us, they might use some of that
leverage to make the newsgroups better for all of us.

.

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