This, the most useful usenet group on the internet, is now being totally spoilt by spam. Is it time to have a uk.d-i-y.moderated, and all move there?
Or could we get the North Koreans to help us out with a sales demonstrator?
R.
the spam is easy to spot, and a loser like that wont be in business long. Meanwhile the antispammers of the gorup will work their various ways.
There have been far bigger spam onslaughts before. I remember one guy calling himself hipcrime posting whole pages of garbage posts to show he could, then asking for money for spamvertising for companies.
And who would volunteer to mod the great quantity of posts that we have anyway. Maybe Dr Drivel?
NT
I find it mildly annoying as I hit the delete and killfile keys. Spoilt, never.
Any moderated group always reflects the views of the moderator - like most newspapers. And moderators are often people like Drivel...
We have had this debate for various reasons every few months for many years. Another has been to subdivide by topic area.
Neither have had support because moderation tends to stifle and eventually destroy newsgroups because they become boring and subdivision would lead to too much fragmentation of ideas. Quite often topics wander, but this is reality in normal conversation so is reasonable for a newsgroup also. It is very easy to search archives anyway
I don't think that the group is spoiled by SPAM at all, the volume is not that high and with a proper news reader easily filtered out.
I think that one of the main reasons for SPAM is because newsgroups have been plagiarised and published on various web sites making them both visible to the spammers and easy to address. Unfortunately, there is not a lot that can be done about it.
Talking of which, he's been very quiet lately.
I find the spam is pretty easy to spot so just ignore it.
Besides which, who aside from Mr Hall/Gabriel has enough time to sit here moderating submissions? Mary perhaps? ;-)
Mathew
As a fairly recent poster to this group I think its OK as is :-)
Perhaps it's new catalogue season? Stocktaking at the counter? PM given him a new van to play with? Nurse taken his keyboard away as punishment for throwing food?
Or perhaps he's finally flipped. After all that nonsense about informing the police over me calling him a pratt, or something.
No, moderation would destroy it.
Why, I see very little spam in this group, and it is usually obvious so is easily avoided.
That could be descibed as spam.
Alan
Hey, don't you wake him up!
Alan
The message from Andy Hall contains these words:
He's taking a long time to adjust to life in my killfile :-), but don't tempt providence.
|This, the most useful usenet group on the internet, is now being totally |spoilt by spam. Is it time to have a uk.d-i-y.moderated, and all move |there? | |Or could we get the North Koreans to help us out with a sales demonstrator?
This is a *very* good group as it stands, the spam causes me no real problems, I just ignore it.
Finding and keeping moderators is a *difficult* job.
You mean they never showed up?
Here was me thinking that you were writing all of this from inside Wandsworth.....
I was seriously thinking about setting up some BBS type software and inviting half a dozen people here to 'moderate' it..need a bit of commercial sponsorship to pay for it tho.
The model I would base it on is
The huge benefits would be to allow posting of pictures. And low key moderation. Plus splitting topics into broad categories.
If there is support and someone has some bandwidth somewhere to host it, it might be worth taking it further.
I think that depends on the moderation style.
If its limited to simply removing posts that are pure abuse, or have absolutely no relevance, or legally liable wordage...then its fine.
No - it would be difficult to drag myself away from the satellite TV in the cells...
Yes - I'm a co-moderator on an e-mail based group. Basically, we only check new posts. Members are expected to behave themselves. The work involved in moderating a busy open group like this would be vast. I'd guess at least an hour+ a day - every day.
I hadn't even noticed there had been spam posted recently until you mentioned it. I think maybe that I have been around here long enough to only see the posts that might be worth reading.
There are moderated DIY web forums out there. They often seem to have useful talk in them but they are different to here. I like the slightly anarchic feel of Usenet and there seems to be a more interesting mix of people than web forums which often seem full of, how should we say, the intellectually challenged. The act of having to set up a news reader seems to weed out most. I do get sick of the Combi boiler, cheap/expensive power tool type flame wars but they probably wouldn't be deleted in a moderated forum anyway
Spam seems no where near as bad as it once was, internet provider level filtering seems to work quite well these days, well on Pipex anyway - though that's about the only good thing about their news feed.
H| |The huge benefits would be to allow posting of pictures. And low key |moderation. Plus splitting topics into broad categories.
Uk.* is a text only hierachy.
An RFD would have *no* chance of passing.
|If there is support and someone has some bandwidth somewhere to host it, | it might be worth taking it further.
I oppose as not necessary, and it would split the best newsgroup I am subscribed to.
See last months posts in uk.answers.
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