Re: Taking out the garbage

Ray M. Owen wrote:
HI All

Just finished doing further research into our SPAM problem.

1) USENET does have some EXISTING forums that are controlled, to some
extent.

2) Those controlled forums are the ONLY USENET forums that will have
any control.

3) It is possible to build a new GOOGLE group for RAMPS and copy the
archive to it.

4) As with all GOOGLE groups, it is possible to apply varying levels
of control, based on the groups needs.

MY question to the RAMPSers is, do you want to do the following (or
some variation on the theme):

Do you want to create a GOOGLE group with access limited to members.
All members would be able to post without having someone approve it.
A group of moderators would be established, from the group, to take
care of those members that don't follow the rules, by deleting SPAM or
booting excessive SPAMers.

FWIW, I am still in the process of cleaning out the garbage from the
archive.

Let me know what you think about any/all of this.

Without wishing to be rude, I'd suggest that you learn how usenet (What most people call newsgroups) *actually* works.

*Any* message posted to *any* connected news server, other than a post to a moderated group, is almost immediately forwarded to *all* other connected servers, where a copy is stored locally. So, to stop spam, you need to delete it from the originating server *before* it is forwarded, which normally takes a few seconds at most. *Some* servers use a program called "Cleanfeed" to kill *some* spam on the way in. Some of the spammers have their own news servers, they're not all that hard or expensive to set up. Once a message has been forwarded, it is impossible to get it removed, both due to the number of copies that exist after a few seconds and the large number of servers that do not honour cancel requests. You say you are cleaning spam from "the archive of r.a.m.p.s", but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of archives of this and other newsgroups held independently all over the world, even before you count the users that archive posts locally for offline reference.

Some groups are moderated, and in theory, all posts to these groups are read and approved by a moderator before being allowed onto the list, but that's nothing to do with Google.

Usenet was, as was the Internet and before that ARPANET, set up to be extremely robust and tolerant of network problems in a period when most users were not commercially motivated. The messages *must* get through.

"Google groups" are just normal usenet groups that use the *Google interface* to hide some posts from users of the Google interface *only*. If you log onto what you are calling a "Google group" using a normal newsreader, you can read all the messages, *including* the spam that is being hidden from the users of the Google interface *only*. So, if you use the Google interface to look at a "Google group", you are using Google to filter out spam which mostly originates from Google users. This has been proved on many other groups before now, when similar proposals were made.

For a previous try:-

http://groups.google.co.ug/group/sci.bio.ecology/browse_thread/thread/11d51c4219858dce

It didn't work, everybody could post using a standard newsreader program, but only Google users couldn't read the posts. Mehran Basti never did figure out how people were posting junk on "his" Google forums. :-)

Put briefly, it is *very* hard to even accidentally lose a message for any length of time, no matter what goes wrong. The Google interface to usenet, by its mode of operation, makes it easier for spammers to gain access to this network, and since Google started operations on usenet, spam has increased manyfold, with a large percentage of it originating from Google users.

If, on the other hand, you want to set up a moderated forum, then you need a web address, a host computer, some moderators and a hosting program, but what you set up will be similar to every other web based forum out there in the facilities it offers. It will not be a "Google group", as there is no such thing outside Google's interface.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.
.

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