Garbage Posts

Yes.

Long answer you'll have to learn how to use the filters and score files of your news reader in order to train it to ignore key words and posters. If you want help with that you'll have to pose your questions to the correct newgroup.

PS Posting via google you're SOL.

Not really, the Usenet was meant to be open to all. If you've got nothing but time on your hands, you could send messages to the servers people are using -- yahoo, google, and the newest offender --

commonly called the Usenet's cloaca.

AOL was the problem years ago, they were teaching the newbies the Usnet was a "friendly place where anything goes". It got to the point that some major servers just started blocking it. That gave AOL a reputation for not being a real internet source, and that slowly changed the way AOL and AOLers behaved.

The Usenet is the original peer-to-peer network. Stuff gets posted to a local server, and then propagated to other servers, then stored on those servers for as long as they want to hold it. You can't kick your local server hard enough to make the world feel it. There's always local filtering, like someone else said. But people who are desparate to be annoying can be very creative.

Kevin,

It also tends to be a seasonal thing. Best thing is to IGNORE IT and NEVER respond to it on the NG --- and never cross post! Cross posting responses are the posts the mess up the system as much!

Just blocking "at home" removes an awful of rubbish on your own pc. Just as you can block me when I go off the deep end occasionally

I know it is annoying but at least you have sensibly set up a new topic instead of responding to the original posts.

If you are really uptight about it you can get back to the originators ISP and complain ------------but it usually does no good!!!!!! And even trying to email them direct won't work 'cos it will be a false address

You can join a moderated forum like

where everyone is friendly and garbage posts are deleted - so is the user posting garbage.

Scott

Thank you all especially scott f. I checked the site and bookmarked it. As a Senior who has been making wine since the 50's I'm basically a neophyte when it comes to the computer. I have had several viruses and crashes and as a result am very cautious. However I allow others usage and am afraid they might open one of the garbage posts. Google should, imo, do somethig about them. I have enjoyed the forum and feel like I made dozens, if not more, friends. Several of you have taken time to email me personally. To all of you I wish you all the best of everything in 2005. I will miss both you and the forum. Kevin

everyone is

garbage.

Thanks Scott for the link. There are a lot of forums with a tight knit community, offering friendly advice and polite discussion. They're good to find, they must be what the net was like, back in the last millennium.

If you need more diverse info, you can always use google groups and do a search. You won't have to read junk unless you include "Make money now" in your search criteria.

What irks me is those select forums that simply link to the usenet with a fancy frontend and basically lie to their subscribers, claiming that they've just built this "group" and go ahead, jump on in, introduce yourself and your cat, then try to sell your babysitting services, and by all means, demand a prompt response to your question, emailed just to you, in Microsoft Word format only.

If you read the groups with a newsreader program rather than using google groups, you can usually configure your program to display the postings in "text only" mode. This greatly lessens the chance of "infections" as long as you are also very careful about opening attachments. The same can be done for e-mail.

Bob