Keep in mind I'm not taking a dig at anyone. This is just my way of
dealing with Usenet. If the situation changed as the poster below has
indicated by saying 18K posts have been spammed on one forum, I would
for sure be taking a close look at solving that in whatever way was needed.
DH


Larry Dighera wrote:
Larry Dighera wrote:
On Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:01:00 -0400, "Kyle Boatright"
wrote in
:

I'm seeing a huge number of spam postings in this group. I'm sure they are
from a bot, but since the address keeps switching, I don't know how to block
the messages in OE.

Suggestions?

It would seem that the rec.aviation.piloting newsgroup, like many
other newsgroups, is being targeted for a "sporge" flood. In this
first flood, the articles were injected into Usenet from 13:30 to
11:21 (local), about ten hours. It is unclear to me at this time why
this is occurring, but it may be more than a malicious prank. ...

While I have not yet found a method of filtering out the sporge
articles, I have found some promising leads:

Each article is crossposted to the sci.crypt newsgroup.

The 'Path:' header field always contains:
news.isoc.lu!news.grnet.gr

The 'Subject:' header field always begins with a lower-case letter

Perhaps filters can be successfully written to exploit these
consistencies.

My fear is that newsgroup subscribers who are unable to filter out the
sporge articles may become so frustrated as to discontinue to
participate in newsgroup discussion in the future.

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007 10:34:47 -0400, Dudley Henriques
wrote in
:
Must be just me, but I never have one iota of trouble with these
"issues" and can't figure out why people seem to be so bothered by them.
I've always used forums by scrolling through headers until finding
something I decided from that header was something I might want to read
or answer. If the header was suspect or didn't pique my interest, I just
keep scrolling on down. No biggie at all.

With a flood of articles like this, it's like looking for the
proverbial needle, isn't it? You have to read so many sporge headers,
that you give up trying to find legitimate articles.

Trolls, idiots, morons, and Mensa dropouts will always be a part of any
Usenet forum. These things are so unimportant to me and take so little
time to wade through that I just accept them as part of the "game" and
don't bother even using filters.

This is not about trolls; it's about a flood of junk articles drowning
out the legitimate articles.

Anyone looking for the "perfect" news reader or an answer for every
unpleasant aspect they find on a Usenet forum will in my opinion find
their Usenet experience very frustrating.

It has been brought to my attention that Forte Agent 4.x will filter
on the 'Newsgroups:' header.

FWIW, I just tell people to read the headers, use the scroll wheel, and
stay loose on Usenet. Enjoy the good, and just deal with the bad.

That has always worked in the past, but there haven't been any sporge
floods in this newsgroup in the past.

Personally, I have absolutely no trouble at all dealing with Usenet, and
am always in awe of all the fuss about filtering :-))
All this being said, I'm not trying to put anyone down with this post.
I realize this is just me and the way I deal with things, and I respect
everyone else doing whatever they feel they have to do to deal with Usenet.
Dudley Henriques


It has been suggested that the free nfilter program will permit
filtering on any news header field to be used with any news reader:
http://www.nfilter.org/ . I haven't tried it yet.


--
Dudley Henriques
President Emeritus
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship