I'm sure that some of you must have noticed that rec.crafts.brewing has been ruined with a sporge flood -- thousands of obviously computer-generated off-topic crap posts that don't even make any sense. I even noticed that some of them now bear my name as author, so I want to assure the home-brewing community that I have nothing whatsoever to do with that.
I have been looking for a way to filter those posts, but haven't come up with a solution yet, and it is just about impossible to discuss this issue on r.c.b. with the condition that it's in. I decided to try using Google Groups in the hope that it is somehow filtering the sporge, but it has the same problem. Has anyone found a way to fix this problem without the need to buy software or subscribe to the groups though a paid service?
Bill, most big news providers do the spam filtering for you ... for example I didn't see any of what you described at all in r.c.b. ...
Are you using your ISP's news service? If so, you may want to look for a different server or contact your ISP and ask them who they use, if they outsource. You could recommend Supernews - which is who my ISP uses and which filters practically everything out (I very rarely see more than a couple spams a week in r.c.b.).
I'd expect that there should be some small news providers out there that only provide text newsgroups that would be very cheap or free (ie., no binary groups - which is where the tons and tons of bandwidth and disk storage is required).
It's still there. My newsreader shows that r.c.b. has 13,434 posts.
Yes -- Windstream (formerly Alltel) -- which provides my telephone as well as DSL service, etc.
If so, you may want to look for
I'll check it out, but you can imagine my trying to make much headway with a very large corporation. By the way, if you are not aware of it, there was an advance warning of the planned flood posted in r.c.b. which recommended using Supernews if one wanted to filter the flood, so there was some discussion of whether Supernews might have been behind it to begin with, but with some opinions were that this was someone just trying to create problems for Supernews.
Outlook express does not have the filter choices to solve the problem. I am seeing way less garbage posts now than a couple days ago, fortunately. I did go through rcb messages and mark the garbage as "ignored", which at least makes it easier to scan through them, plus you can select to "hide read or ignored" messages. Why on earth they don't give the option of "hide ignored messages" I can't conceive. I don't think microsoft cares about usenet.
If this continues, I may try using nFilter and see how it works.
How do you manage to delete them, Steve. For Usenet posts, I only have the option to cancel messages that I have posted myself, so I can't delete anyone else's posts, although I can mark them as "read" and to "ignore thread" which will be more tedious trouble than I care for. I think I will just quit reading posts on r.c.b. until this nonsense stops; I'll check periodically to still if it is still being sporged, and I have sent two messages to my ISP requesting that they do something about this. Meanwhile, I have PLENTY of other brewing forums as a resource for help, advice, and just plain interesting reading: these two newsgroups, plus I subscribe to a couple dozen brewing mailing lists and visit a number of brewing forums or blogs where I mostly lurk. If anyone is interested, here's my list of what I consider the top 10 brewing maillists that have helped me the most (besides my own groups in my signature block, below):
Home Brew Digest:
formatting link
Australian Craft Brewers:
formatting link
home_brew (Yahoo Group):
formatting link
UK Homebrew (United Kingdom):
formatting link
Bathtub Brewers:
formatting link
Zymurgy:
formatting link
Members of Barleyment:
formatting link
Maltose Falcons:
formatting link
SODZ:
formatting link
Austin Zealots:
formatting link
I prefer maillists to discussion boards because I can sort the messages, mark them, save them to different files, and filter particular members. If anyone else has any really good maillists, please post.
I guess it has to do with what reader you use for Usenet. I use outlook express (XP) or windows mail (vista). You can select and delete messages in these programs.
For those who use binaries where yEnc is a popular form of encoding,
formatting link
is a free plug-in that will decode yEnc binaries within these programs.
BTW, a very interesting list of discussion boards, Cheers Bill!
I use Netscape, which allows filtering, but is not adaptable enough to help filter this sporge -- just particular email addys or names, etc. While Outlook Express might do better, I'm not interested in changing readers because I like the way I have my folders etc. setup here.
DrinksForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.