Filtering the Anonymous USENET Trolls?

BoneFlower asks: "Anonymous remailers are all well and good, but sometimes people use them to abuse people through email or through trolling newsgroups. I've had limited results filtering "anonymous" on a USENET group I frequent but many anonymous remailer trolls get through. The group was nearly unuseable for over a week due to the volume of anonymous remailer trolls. Does anyone have tips on filtering them out? I personally use Forte Agent 1.9.1, many others use Netscape/Mozilla, OE, and various others. If you could help us out, we'd appreciate it."

Comments

Re:How ironic...

[Restil]

everyone knows usenet is only for pr0n and mp3z/w4r3z

Your statement has some element of truth to it. Probably 99% of the usenet data is devoted to these time honored traditions. However, these are generally not the areas that are inflicted with trolls. The binary newsgroups typically are pretty well organized, and most of the commentary is devoted to requests or to flaming those who haven't learned how to post properly yet. Pron newsgroups get a lot of spam and heated discussions as to image quality... or content quality. *Ahem*... or so I've heard.

The trolls prey upon the general discussion groups. That is because they can actually get a voice there. If you're in a binary group, you're there to download binaries, and thus, you're going to download the multipart messages that are visibly 10-15 megs in size. The individual messages you can scroll by in a heartbeat without ever paying attention to anything more than the message size. Even the title won't stand out. Trolls get no audience this way. Now, if the trolls took to posting large binaries for kicks, that would be something different. And while I'm not saying that they don't, I've never encountered this on usenet, although I have seen it done on the various P2P networks. It would appear, that if someone's going to spend 3 days uploading something, they're not going to waste their upstream on something just so one person can download it then post a warning message to the rest of the group to ignore it.

-Restil