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Comment by arjenmarkus | Hacker News Reader

We have seen a single obnoxious poster who posts long Italian posts ranting about murderers and other criminals. The posts are easily recognised because they are all in capitals with very long titles. As a group we have reported these postings as abuse and then they get hidden from the ordinary overview. For this sanitary action we seem to have been punished.

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Makes sense. Why ban the Google user when they can ban the whole news group (from their interface) instead.

This awoke some latent memories of Forte Agent, the NTP (?) client? Good times..

This same spam has been going for years, but the poster keeps changing their identity. It's always all-caps, lots of references to mafia, assasins, paedofilia etc.

Maybe gmail addresses should be prevented from posting or whitelisted?

NNTP. NTP is for synchronizing clocks.

PTP is for synchronizing clocks. NTP is for getting them close ;)

Ah, thanks. I tried to just type something from memory - definitely NNTP, Network News Transfer Protocol.

I loved Forte! Installed next to it was mIRC. Then you're all set!

Ah, simpler times, before everything turned to shit. I miss custom native internet clients.

Absolutely. I actually used it as my primary email client for years, a well.

Those spams should be NoCeM'ed, and google groups should accept trusted NoCeM announces. But I doubt google ever cared about Usenet at all.

> But I doubt google ever cared about Usenet at all

Doubt? This is without doubt: For-profit companies cares about generating profits. If they own something that doesn't generate profits, the only reason they even own it is because they haven't figured out how to close it down yet, or how to earn profits on it, or they think it leads to profits in other areas.

Of course they don't care about making information more widely available for free, they care about making money. Hardly surprising that they prefer to spend the least amount of time on moderating, closing the entire group is way simpler and cost-effective (according to them, apparently).

It seems comp.lang.python and comp.lang.c are banned also, very probably for the same reason.

Well, I see it as good news, to have Google's dirty, greedy hands out of another Usenet group.

Then again, Google Groups holds one of the largest Usenet archives on the 'net. (Because Google bought it.)

Eh, it's as if Exxon were owners of a natural park. I would have preferred that archive in the hands of the Internet Archive.

That message has words about child abuse. The bot closed the group.

Talking about child abuse is against the terms of service?

Google doesn't seem to be willing to invest in trying to understand context with their moderation algorithms.

Training to detect UseNet kooks should not be that hard doing it on just keywords is just stupid.

SIMPLY BANNING POSTS WITH ALL CAPS SHOULD BE ENOUGH.

EVEN IF THE KOOKS ADAPT AND USE PROPER CASE, THAT'S STILL A VICTORY.

Just a thought :)

Now that's an easy DoS, if I ever saw one.

Oh, I see those in comp.lang.lisp, too. They outnumber actual posts by about 4 to 1.

There was one of those spamming the Racket mailing list now for years. WTF is the deal with that anyway?

Wow if getting a group banned is that easy, then it's more like a vulnerability because the same can be scaled up and get almost any group banned (as the banning is also automatic as I see in another comment below).

There are similar posts in comp.lang.lisp.

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