comp.os.linux.networking

On Thu, 10 Apr 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.networking, in
article , Dave Uhring wrote:

>David Schwartz wrote:

>> Dave Uhring wrote:

>>> Many of us simply killfile posts containing "Message-ID:
>>> googlegroups.com" due to the immense amount of spam and other abuse
>>> originating there.

>> 1) Who is "us"?

Why not wander over to the Usenet newsgroup 'news.software.readers'
and perhaps you'll find some hints. You might even discover some
new acronyms - like UDP (though I doubt it will happen again).

Several years ago, individuals would file abuse complaints for spam,
whether in mail or Usenet. Providers like charter, comcast, roadrunner,
qwest, sbc/what-ever-they-call-themselves-now and others would (at best)
respond with an auto-reply from an ignore-bot. For email, the result of
this lack of response was blacklists that people created to know who
NOT to accept mail from. Usenet has had the capability for over ten
years for the individual to block posts if the administrator of some
server didn't want to deal with abuse complaints.

>Are you some kind of moron?

He's certainly a google supporter.

>> 2) Clearly you don't since you are replying to me, so this is some "us"
>> that doesn't include you?
>
>For the time being only comp.os.linux.misc has a score of -9999 for posts
>from google in my scorefile.

An advantage of using a real news reader and news server is that you can
set scores for individual or multiple groups, or global scores. Not only
am I blocking googlegroups.com in c.o.l.m (as well as seven other groups
of the 80 I try to scan daily), I'm also blocking _replies_ to
googlegroups posts in two groups, where some readers can't resist
replying to such googlespam.

>> 3) Do you have any evidence that this "many of us" consists of anything
>> more than a couple of cranks?

Lessee, there is a newsgroup statistics article posted to this group, and
you might look for such posts - often weekly and occasionally monthly -
in other groups. Notice what is _missing_ in those posts.

>I need no evidence, why do you? Calling people who choose to block spam
>as "cranks" is not really polite.

Some of us really aren't interested in athletic shoes, watches, pills,
tobacco products, and other garbage being spamvertised by google posters,
and don't see the need to try to come up with a multitude of filter rules
to catch the morphing spammers. One rule is all it takes, and I don't
see any indication that I am missing _useful_ posts because of it.

>> 4) The claim that google is somehow not a "real news server" is just
>> bizarre prejudice,

You might want to look at a packet sniffer and see what the traffic
looks like when you are using google. Never mind the advertisements that
google inserts (gee - do I miss that crap?) into their output. You
should also notice the scripting they are trying to use to be able to
provide you with a "better experience" - meaning more targeted ads I
suppose. That's something I don't get from a real news server. The
whole reason for the _existence_ of google is advertisements. The
Usenet archive and search engine are merely attractions google uses to
get you to view the advertisements they've sold. If I can get the same
results without the ads, common sense says I'm going elsewhere.

>Google is a spam sewer

and it ignores abuse complaints, so people ignoring googlegroups is
simply common sense.

Old guy