Preview the new Google Groups Redesign | Hacker News Reader

Preview the new Google Groups Redesign

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12 pointsmcav11 comments

If they don't fix the spam problem, all the redesigns in the world won't help them.

edit: here's a page of a google group I used to read, with all the spam highlighted: http://img.skitch.com/20101209-8rkh5ar3miuhgp3qeh2pj3x9tn.jp...

My thoughts exactly. Gmail has one of the best spam filters I've ever seen. Google Groups has no spam filter at all as far as I can tell. How has this oversight gone on for so long?

"Google Groups has no spam filter at all as far as I can tell."

Sure it does. In the admin section are a few different options for controlling spam. One of the best is to require that first-time posters have their initial post held for moderation.

...which works great for the small groups I manage, but can get unmanageble for larger groups. I believe jQuery moved from Google Groups to Zoho due mainly to the spam problem.

I count myself very lucky that this hasn't happened to any groups I run yet. I have moderation turned on, and that seems to stop all of it. /me knocks on wood.

To some extent that's rather a problem of a missing moderator (especially in usenet groups and mailing list mirrors). I could also understand though if some moderators simply gave up to manually mark spam posts.

Usenet does quite well without moderators - not least because sensible news providers will drop spam before you see it. Google Groups doesn't.

Not to mention that when you look, most of the spam originated from Google Groups.

You can actually preview it by just going to one of the groups as it seems live now (at least for me). I am guessing several people from the gmail team worked on this as it has that same feel and works nicely. I don't use groups very often, but seems like a big improvement.

Seems to break links from "old" groups, eg:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...

The should have rather added an "ignore thread" button. I have some doubts the new tree view helps users to keep an overview in threads with 40+ messages.

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