On Fri, 30 Oct 2009, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.internet.wireless, in article
<3e5f5966-733f-46e2-83c0-54d00bcf3238@u36g2000prn.googlegroups.com>, TBerk
wrote:
NOTE: Posting from groups.google.com (or some web-forums) dramatically
reduces the chance of your post being seen. Find a real news server.
>Christopher A. Lee <ca...@optonline.net> wrote:
>> Kurt Ullman <kurtull...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Or just set your reader up to filter EVERYTHING from
>>> googlegroups.com.
I haven't seen it necessary to go that far yet, though I am filtering
on "Message-ID: googlegroups.com" in 14 of the 76 Usenet newsgroups I
try to scan daily.
>>> When I saw this, I was just thinking how traffic seemed to have
>>> slowed down. Thus the usefulness of filters (grin)
It's more than that. If you look at the number of articles that are
being _offered_ by your news server (before filtering), even that is
decreasing. For this group, the annual figures are:
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Offered 27902 21770 17900 18862 12430 7473 3870
Killed 1905 1504 1746 4321 3855 1888 2178
(figures are to 1400 UTC 31 Oct 2009 - annualized estimates for 2009
would be 4464 offered, 2614 killed.) The number of articles that
hit the filter isn't that far from my historical average, but the
overall number of articles is down substantially. This makes it appear
that the spam level is worse. The _ratio_ is, but not so much the
absolute numbers. (This overall decline is true across Usenet.)
>> With a higher priority watch filter for the few google users you
>> want to hear from.
[compton ~]$ grep '^Score:' /var/spool/slrnpull/score | sort | uniq -c
| column
11 Score: =-9999 22 Score:: =-9999 1 Score:: =10
[compton ~]$
Very little is scored up - but I don't seem to miss much that I would
be interested in. With this news tool, a single colon is an "AND" rule
meaning all conditions for that rule have to be met before the score
applies - the :: is an "OR" rule meaning that any rule match triggers
the score.
>I get lumped in with that wide assed paintbrush.
Which is why my news reader automatically inserted that 'NOTE:' at the
top of this post. One of the characters on Usenet - the late "Blinky
the Shark" - operated "The Usenet Improvement Project" which used to
be at
http://improve-usenet.org. It's been mirrored elsewhere, so the
shark's philosophy lives on.
>I have an Eternal September account but I also have a few details to
>work out yet to make it useful.
Contrary to popular belief, googlegroups.com is not the only alternative.
>I _have_ been bitched at others for using Google Groups before.
ALL of google is an advertising service. Their data mining and
archiving is done solely to better tailor the advertisements they are
targeting at you. Regrettably, they intentionally ignore spam
complaints - apparently they feel the increased number of items they
are able to show will increase their sales revenue. This is in spite
of the fact that they could virtually eliminate the abuse originating
on their server with _trivial_ effort on their part. They have also
``improved'' their search engine in such a way as to destroy much of
the usefulness it once had. You have no doubt seen responses to
frequently asked questions referring the poster to 'JFGI' (Just F*
Google It). I'm no longer recommending people try to search at
google simply because it has become so useless. Hell, in some cases
the ads they show don't even match the topic I'm looking for. There
really are a lot of other search engines out there, and most are not
as obnoxious as google. Google's time has passed.
Old guy
It's a damn shame to see this happening. 
Linear Mode
