jQuery Dev Bemoans Overwhelming Spam On Google Groups

angryrice tips a blog post by John Resig, lead developer for jQuery, about the failure of Google Groups to manage spam, declaring attempts to use it as a public discussion system "completely futile." Quoting: "The final straw was placed upon my patience with the Google Groups system a few weeks ago. Spammers are now spoofing the email addresses of existing group participants to sneak their messages through. Previously you would've seen a delightful 'FREE MOVIE DOWNLOADS' spam from 'freemovies123@gmail.com' — but now you'll see it coming from existing group users — or even the group moderators themselves. This cheat completely bypasses the moderation system since the spammers are pretending to be pre-moderated users. The Google Groups system is completely fooled. The spam message comes in claiming to be from an existing group participant — and according to the Google Groups interface there is no difference. If you click the user's name you'll be taken to a full listing of that user's posts (with the spam messages delightfully interspersed)."

Comments

Tragedy of the Commons

[oldspewey]

I used to be an avid newsgroup participant way back in the day. The flamewars were legendary, and the amount of technical information exchanged on some of those groups was beyond description.

If there were a way to use spammers for fuel, I'd have no qualms solving our energy woes that way ...

Time to bring back the cancelbots?

[argent]

If this is a Usenet group that Google Groups is just providing an interface to, I guess it's time to bring back the cancelbots. UDP against Google. It's come close before.

If this is one of the Google Groups that's a web forum, then they need to require that you actually log in before posting.