Google Groups hacked; spammers are moving your posts and adding SEO keywords | Hacker News Reader

Google Groups hacked; spammers are moving your posts and adding SEO keywords

groups.google.com

87 pointsstickfigure21 comments

On Usenet, "Google groups" - which provides easy Usenet access to the clueless, and violates netiquette by default - is only one notch above "AOL". Search "eternal september" for more information.

(By the way, aioe.net provides a good free newsserver, as does eternal-september.org. Of course, you'll have to go elsewhere for binaries.)

Thanks for those references, though it's aioe.org, not .net.

Somehow I don't find this too surprising, Google Groups was promising many years ago, but this days it is in a rather depressing state:

- Search works much worse than either inside Gmail or googling a different web archive of a mailinglist (I think this has improved a bit recently, but before it was so broken as to be unusable) - The UI was clunky, and the new (half finished, there are still parts of the site with the old one) is even clunkier (why can't people at Google even give pages proper URLs?) - It is a spam cesspool, the only way to keep spam out of a group is to make every first email moderated, this again is strange given how well spam filtering works in Gmail.

I still tend to use it because the hassle of running a mailing list server is just not worth it, and for some reason I trusted Google wouldn't take it down any time soon (but given their track record with other products, I guess I was being naive), but is sad that Google is doing such a poor job with a product that easily could be much better.

Is google still investing resources in Google Groups? It doesn't look that way.

yes. This is under active development https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview

Google abandoned "Google" Groups (Usenet belongs to Google?) years ago and gave in to spammers.

Yea, there was a period of time where it sucked (I remembered it too), but now it is much better.

I think the 'Google Groups' name refers more to being a Google search engine that searches groups (similar to 'Google Photos' or 'Google Videos').

Google Groups isn't just Usenet either -- they also allow creating private and public groups similar to Yahoo Groups.

In the last year Groups has had pretty significant work done on improvements. A complete new AJAX based design, better moderation controls for forum owners, and even Q&A features that are being tested in some Google Support forums.

I'm not convinced the new AJAX interface is a big improvement, and the old interface was already not particularly great.

Groups is also offered as part of Google Apps, where it's actually useful (as internal mailinglists with web-based archive) since it's a closed environment.

It still seems to be the easiest way to setup and manage a small mailing list. I don't need more features and we just got a big UI update.

I wonder if it's just bug abuse? Does anyone remember when you could remove random websites from Google's index by simply logging into your account and then inserting another website address? I wouldn't be surprised if this was a similar exploit.

Sad state of affairs. I agree its ok for Apps folks but it isn't even as good as Yahoo Groups in terms of implementation. Sad really because its a useful service.

That being said, looking at all the ways folks try to infiltrate PHP based forum groups using search engines to identify weak implementations I think its just part of the environment one has to live in.

What am I supposed to see? I just see the new version of Google Groups.

Read the thread.

Google has a serious quality problem. Check out the link to the Google Groups page...

1.) Does not scroll with the mouse wheel unless you are in 'certain areas' of the page (aka broken). 2.) They are using Frames, like this is 1999 3.) Instead of easy-to-read button names, they are icons of unknown purpose. 4.) Why all the wasted white space?

Google is a bunch of college smart alecs... you see that in the tone of their posts. But sites like Google Groups are garbage.

This comment is basically trollish but anyway...

You can scroll on the parts of the page... that scroll. The side bar and app bar are fixed (just like in GMail and a bunch of other Google properties now) so naturally the mouse wheel won't scroll them or the page.

Not that I use Google Groups / Usenet from a browser often, but here it goes...

#1 and #2 Google should consider the scroll from any UI component; however, I have to wonder where you have drawn such a conclusion to 1999 UI/UX. You are seriously against fixed-position controls?

#3 You must have an axe to grind with Google and/or Gmail. At Gmail, the label-less buttons were daunting for all of one minute. In the case of Google Groups, the buttons are quite obvious and ubiquitous with their other properties. Again, if you at all use Google Apps, the buttons are a non-issue; are we going to complain about the obvious purpose of the "home" button on an iPhone?

#1 and #2 are annoying. They need to stop it.

#3 I do not want to mouse over everything to find out what button to click. I'd prefer it if they labeled the buttons.

I prefer interface design that isn't stupid.

The buttons should have labels. Google shouldn't assume every person who log's onto any Google app will know what they mean.Even though I'm a power user and I still prefer labels to icons.

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