The other alternative is to use a proxy application which sits between your ISP's news server and the program you use to read news on your machine. I use "News Proxy" which is a simple program that enables you to use advanced kill-rules to avoid downloading much of the guff.
Basically, rather than your news reader connecting directly to your ISP's news server, it connects to News Proxy which in turn connects to your ISP's news server. News Proxy checks the headers of articles against the kill rules you supply and decides whether to download them as a result. It works very very well and allows any news reader to utilise advanced kill filing.
In Thunderbird create a message filter called "Chinese spam", select the "Match any of the following" radio button, and set the action to "Ignore Thread".
Now add:
SC cn-circle.com FC jewelry FC cnreplicas FC watch SC paypal accept SC paypal accept FC Santhosh FC .cn FC sneakers SC .cn
(where SC = Subject Contains, and FC = From Contains)
That seems to kill 95%+ of it. Each time one slips through you can usually add another line as required
Easy with TB as well: CTRL click all the threads to delete (or click the first and Shift click the last if there is a sequential run of them), then kit "K". That will kill all the threads. You need to switch away from the newsgroup and back again to actually see them removed form the list though.
I hadn't participated in this thread because I couldn't initially see what all the fuss was about. I have two news servers, teranews.com which I set up a couple of years ago for a one off nominal payment of a couple of quid but no longer use and my main one Datemas.de which I set up because the teranews one has such a small download allowance that even watching a dozen or so text only groups kept putting me over the limit and cutting my service off for 24 hours. I think the limit was 60mb a day but how the hell you can exceed that just with a few text groups I have no idea. With binary groups you download music and video from then sure but text posts are only a few kb each. I think the thing was a scam but it's academic now since I don't use them any more.
The Datemas server was something I chanced upon by luck and is free but is not taking any new subscribers now. I got in a year or so ago just before they closed the door. There isn't any spam to speak off on it. Maybe the occasional offer of cheap sneakers or something. So just out of curiosity I fired up the old Teranews account, added this group and downloaded the first few hundred posts. Holy Crap! It's just solid with offers of cheap watches all from slightly different user names so you can't easily block them. There must be over 50 already this morning and I see about the same on the 12th.
So Datemas is obviously filtering all this shit out at source and Teranews isn't doing a thing about it. I can now see what the fuss is about and thank god I got in with Datemas just in time. So I guess a better server is what you need but as to which ones are any good I have no idea.
What also mystifies me is why these idiots post all this spam crap. Surely anyone having to plough through it all must get so pissed off they'd never buy anything from them anyway.
This morning is (for me) the worst day ever for spam here. Usually I have seen a handful each morning with the odd one or two coming in through the day. This is a tsunami.
My take is that there must be some other reason for the poster(s) doing this. Surely there are not enough idiots who respond? Are "they" probing our responses to these posts? But try as I might, I can't fathom it out.
On another group, I have seen that TeraNews is taking up to several days to propagate updates. Wonder if that is in any way connected.
yes the spam was even worse by this evening, but I am far less affected than all you people using traditional news servers.
Before Google Groups began I used the standard Demon news server which worked in the traditional way.
IMHO Google groups is a huge improvement, minor snags - main lack of spam filtering - aside. It makes the best use of current technology. With the current low cost of processing and storage there should be no need to clog up comms lines nor fill end users disc storage with data which may never be wanted.
Google Groups allows me to see current posting headings and select those of immediate interest. Others are retained in its filestore [NB NOT mine :-)) ] should I ever wish to search for them. I do not have the time nor inclination to read every post, nor I am here at home all the time even if I did. The risk of encountering viruses in posts is reduced too (you only access posts of potential interest.
GG has a good search engine which lets me find relevant items for new jobs as they crop up AND I can search ALL groups monitored by Google without having had the prescience to decide, maybe years ahead, which groups could be of interest.
IMHO GG is at least 80% of what a good modern newsgroup server should be.
All in all, then, I cannot see any basis for strong objections to Google Groups. Yes, it does try to make you think it owns all the groups, but I can live with that.
ISTM that the spam problem would largely disappear for Google Group users if a front end could be written such that dud topic titles could be filtered off before being presented. As dud titles are easy to spot, it surely can't be that hard a job?
This is a particularly easy one if you run your own newsserver, as you just setup postnews.google.com as an alternative name for your own newsserver and such articles aren't presented to you, and you don't propagate them on to anyone else if you peer. When I ran a usenet peer, I did this with some of the irresponsible news providers which encouraged spamming by ignoring abuse reports (not Google at that time), and it made a large difference to the signal to noise ratio. A lot of newsmasters did something like this which has the effect of slowing articles from spamming news providers and increases the chances of cancels arriving first even at servers which aren't applying any such filtering.
I suspect you are making the assumption that traditional news servers download all of the posts to local storage. While this is indeed an option with many it is not the only way of working.
With broadband connectivity the common way many use newsreaders is to simply have them software display headers. Only when you click on a message to read it does the actual message body get retrieved.
Hmm, I suspect the reverse is actually true in many cases. The fact that you are accessing web content with a browser you run the usual risks of stumbling across some content that can cause harm. Not something that is likely with a news client.
Yup, nothing wrong with that - searching is what it does well.
Compared to using a more tailored client it is slow and cumbersome, the ability to filter threads of no interest and follow those that are is also poor.
Maybe not, but that seems to be based on a lack of awareness of the things you can achieve with news software that you can't with GG.
Yup - I just hit K to kill the thread and never see it again (assuming my filters have not done it for me already).
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Lobster saying something like:
Google for nfilter, or known as NewsProxy sometimes. It's an easy install you simply put on your PC and it filters news postings by any header you like. Great for allowing you to carry on using your favourite newsreader and simply add on filtering. It slows down retrieval a bit, but I've found the best way to keep the speed up is to regularly purge.
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