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.

Google Beta

[slack_justyb]

I see a lot of Google's products needing the oh so familiar Beta label again.
Seriously, Google's offering is not without it's serious drawbacks, and I suspect that the good stuff is to be had from actual paid services. However, this kind of letting crap slip where people can spoof the name of a valid member is a serious Alpha quality flaw. What's the point of identifying anyone, if everyone can pretend to be everyone else? I mean that is the actually concept of identity, to uniquely label something as different as other things.
I think Google is trying to take on more than it can handle and it is beginning to really show now that they've removed the excuse of "Beta".

Re:Join the 21st Century

[doconnor]

This is an issue that really bugged me. The move to web based forums from Usenet and mailing list was a giant step backwards in functionally.

Advantages of Usenet and mailing lists over web based forums:

The user can control the interface
killfiles
threading
discussion on issues where centralized in one place rather then across multiple web forums
better searching
better archiving
less bandwidth

More advanced web forums, like Slashdot, do a better job of supporting these features, but most people still use very primitive forums.

Re:Perhaps a new mail header?

[Volante3192]

An amazingly common misconception. People don't actually buy things advertised by spam. Err, [citation needed]?

Here's mine: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/12-of-e-mail-users-try-to-buy-stuff-from-spam-e-mail.ars

Slightly less than half (48 percent) said that they have never clicked on a spam e-mail. That's the good news, but that means the other half have clicked on or responded to spam. But why? The answers will undoubtedly horrify you. A full 12 percent said that they were interested in the product or service being offered—those erection drug and mail order bride ads do reach a certain market, it appears.

Seventeen percent said that they made a mistake when they did so—understandable—but another 13 percent said they simply had no idea why they did it; they just did. Another six percent "wanted to see what would happen."

Re:Join the 21st Century

[Anonymous Coward]

No local control over filtering and sorting, forced to use your weird UI and editor instead of my own? "Forums" suck. And "easier to control" is not a feature.

Uhm - then why are you posting on Slashdot?

Re:Time to DIY

[ByOhTek]

When you have 10x more spam than relevant material in a topic, it's easy to miss the relevant material.

That, and some spam subjects are just painfully horrible, and nobody should be subjected to the horror of even glancing at them.

Then again, when I saw one suggesting I could own my own Bionic Turtle (I kid you not), spam did rise *a little bit* in my opinion. I still deleted it, but I loved that title.