Spam Causes Microsoft To Kill Newsgroups

eldavojohn writes "Some 2,000 public and 2,200 private newsgroups devoted to and managed by Microsoft support are going to be phased out in favor of forums because of newsgroup spam. The Register calls it 'killing newsgroups' but Microsoft eloquently calls it 'the evolution of communities.' Always managing to spin it in a positive light! Let's hope the spam posts and voting bots in their forums remain controllable."

Comments

What's the problem?

[bondsbw]

Microsoft is obviously choosing a path where they can control spam posting more easily. I don't see how this is bad. Not everything the company does is bad.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Forums are the evolution of news groups,

Re:What's the problem?

[SCHecklerX]

The problem, in general, is the move to forums regardless of company.

I miss being able to just read my subscriptions, along with using a scorefile/killfile. Now I have to create accounts on dozens of web pages and monitor them all separately, without being able to rank based on what I'm interested in. Each web page has its own formats and options. Yes, there are rss feeds, but that doesn't help much if you are an active poster in the community.

We've gone backwards.

Re:What's the problem?

[jedidiah]

Newsgroups had facilities for controlling spam before Microsoft was even aware of the Internet.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like you actually read Microsoft's usenet forums..

Put up or shut up, post your kill file.

Otherwise it didn't happen.

Re:What's the problem?

[Shakrai]

/^From:.*Anonymous Coward/h:j

Re:What's the problem?

[mdwh2]

Whilst I think it's fine for MS to choose what's best for their own groups, I don't see web forums as an evolution. The biggest problem is that you're now restricted by what software the website runs, rather than running your own client (and websites are typically far more limited - have you seen one with a killfile? Even basic things like threading elude most webforum software).

Worse, decisions are made by admins for the decision of all when they should be a user option. Most notably, the "Lock thread" feature of a certain popular webforum software, which inevitably gets used by power crazy admins for "I'm bored of reading this thread now".

Slashdot is pretty good in terms of forum software, but most are far worse. And Slashdot still seems to have problems on every browser I've tried...

Re:What's the problem?

[GreatBunzinni]

How exactly do you control spam posting more easily by abandoning usenet and stick to a web forum? After all, usenet is nothing but an interface to the data. There are plenty of cases where organizations, including private companies, manage fending off spam just fine although they offer support through not only newsgroups but also mailing lists and web forums. For example, Trolltech offers usenet and mailing list access to it's discussion forum and you don't get a drop of spam on it. So why does Microsoft declares itself incompetent and ignorant by claiming that spam is forcing the company to drop support for usenet access?

Re:What's the problem?

[kurt555gs]

"Not everything the company does is bad." -- Yes it is. It's Microsoft for God's sake. It's what they do. They are here to be evil.

Re:What's the problem?

[NevarMore]

To be fair your argument doesn't hold water if you regularly visit official Microsoft sites or even have a Hotmail account. If you do you already have a Live Passport (I think thats what its called) that should work. Microsoft is big enough that it is actually a convenience to have a single login to all of their services and resources.

I'll even go so far as to say that the big *nix distros should get together and support OpenID universally across all their sites for a similar effect.

Re:What's the problem?

[GreatBunzinni]

Exactly.

Moreover, a migration from usenet to web forums is made at the cost of increased bloat, complexity and a degradation of the user experience. I mean, in order for a web forum to provide the simplest features available in any usenet client for decades it has to force the user to download tons of javascript/silverlight scripts each time it refreshes a page. Meanwhile, with NNTP you only download an extremely small text-only message which regularly doesn't even go near 1kB and with that web 2.0 shit you are forced to download more than that in any HTML header, let alone the entire page. Moreover, there is yet to be developed a way to organize a discussion in tree form in a web forum that is remotely decent, let alone capable of competing with what usenet clients have been providing for more than a decade.

So, what exactly are they trying to achieve? Obviously this isn't being done to fight spam. Why does Microsoft hate it's customers?

Re:What's the problem?

[El Lobo]

OMFG!!! Slashdot doesn't have a usenet group!!!!!!

Re:What's the problem?

[Myopic]

So, what exactly are they trying to achieve?

They are trying to achieve a reduction in spam. Didn't you even read the title of the article?

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what exactly are they trying to achieve? Obviously this isn't being done to fight spam. Why does Microsoft hate it's customers?

MS hates its customers because they are customers, who demand things. And as they are customers, they are always right (they have money to give you).

MS wants to deal with consumers, brainless fuckers that just buy what they are told, and will go as far as indebting themselves to significant fractions (or over 100%) of their salary just to get the "latest and greatest"[1] products.

As for why MS are ditching newsgroups - it is all about control. With a website they control who posts, they control who reads, and best of all for them, they can slap adverts on the pages too.

Web 2.0 is just proprietary software 2.0. All the downsides of proprietary software on the desktop, with the added bonus that the application and your data isn't on your computer any more. So the application can be changed at any time (cutting support costs for the vendor - there is only ever 1 version of an app to support), and probably anything can be done with your data too.

[1] So says the marketing info.

Re:What's the problem?

[neokushan]

I know! Heaven forbid that we actually use all that extra bandwidth, processing power and memory that we have just lying around these days. Oh Lordy, it will be a disaster having to download a few hundred kbs on your ~4Meg connection, especially compared to downloading 1kb on a 56k modem of old.

And if that bout of sarcasm wasn't enough, how about a bit of Irony to go with it? You're moaning about the switch from newsgroups to a web-based system ON a web-based commenting system that shares all of the same aspects as any online forum.

Re:What's the problem?

[Speare]

if you regularly visit official Microsoft sites or even have a Hotmail account ... the big *nix distros should get together and support OpenID universally across all their sites for a similar effect.

You make it sound like all that anyone ever wants out of their newsgroups is about the operating systems. Do you know just how many hobbies and topics there are on a real newsgroup server? Do you realize how many separate stand-alone "you-host-em" bulletin board services are out there? There's at least two competing boards for pretty much any major hobby or special interest. There's probably five or six just for radio-controlled-aircraft discussions, then another couple for motorscooters, several for do-it-yourself-electronics, and more for anime, audiophiles, cooking, you name it.

The world of discussion has gotten so fragmented, and everybody's got to authenticate on each service independently. Unless phpBB and the other popular forum software kits start supporting a third-party authentication (hah!), the problem is just going to get worse. Far worse.

Re:What's the problem?

[MediaCastleX]

Isn't there some way to collect all your forum accounts together the way some sites are collecting Social network accounts? I think that should happen soon if this is a trend. Seems like an easy fix to your backward incompatibility issues...and by "your," I mean "our."

Re:What's the problem?

[gstoddart]

We've gone backwards.

Back in the mid 90's, a former co-worker opined that the web had put user-interface design back by at least a decade -- it may have been attributable to someone else, not sure.

Fifteen years later, and I still find myself using a lot of web-based software and wondering what went wrong.

Re:What's the problem?

[Steauengeglase]

Because if you want to get something off of a forum you just send a DMCA notice and it is gone. Also you can buy out someone's forum and easily wire that info into whatever social networking service you plan on building. From a top-down, birds eye view, forums are more easily viewed as assets (in other words, a good thing for everyone but the consumer), while Usenet is like some kind unseen Vole's den.

Re:What's the problem?

[MediaCastleX]

Newsgroups had facilities for controlling spam before Microsoft was even aware of the Internet.

Ha, ha... that was *so* funny...*This is where I roll my eyes and type a stupid message to illustrate this* See, I can fail at being funny, too! =D (Disclaimer: Seriously, I'm just kidding. I really did think it was funny and I just wanted to share. No, I'm not being sarcastic. In fact, I actually think you would know more about this stuff than me. I'm just trying to fit in...I know, I suck.)

Re:What's the problem?

[Bakkster]

They are trying to achieve a reduction in spam. Didn't you even read the title of the article?

I also don't see how, according to the GP, the user experience can possibly be degraded if it was already overrun with spam. If the simple usenet solution is overrun with spam, the only way to prevent it may require an increase in complexity. Simple solutions only solve simple problems, and spam is anything but.

Re:What's the problem?

[NevarMore]

Fair point. I cited some wide ranging categories or vendors that could collaborate and bring things together.

I think its wise to target places like *nix forums, StackOverflow (already does OpenID), and other large admin/developer/power user venues for a consolidated login FIRST. You want to get the power users using it, providing feedback to the developers and getting the admins comfortable with it.

Once they embrace it, they'll be prepared to deploy it and MAKE the normal users start using OpenID instead of separate logins.

Re:What's the problem?

[eln]

Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam. There is no really effective spam-control device for Usenet other than moderated groups, and it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum.

Usenet was great in its time, but its fatal flaw turned out to be an inability to keep out spam. We fought it for years, but the fact is the spammers have won, and it's time to move on to technologies that are better able to control it, like web forums. Yes, Usenet was much nicer back in the old days before the Internet exploded, but a lot of things online were nicer then. NNTP was developed for a world where common courtesy and community policing were sufficient to correct bad behavior, but those days are gone now as the overall population of the 'net has increased exponentially and the technology of spammers has improved so that a few of them can easily drown out the many who are willing to abide by basic netiquette rules.

The world changed. You can either adapt to it or sit back and complain about how things were so much better then, and how kids have no respect for people's lawns anymore. Web forums may have a long way to go before they can match the feature set on Usenet 15 years ago, but they beat the hell out of today's Usenet in terms of signal to noise ratio, and for many of us that's the more important thing.

Re:What's the problem?

[Inda]

I'm just amazed to learn that people can post text messages on Usenet!

In all my years of navigating a.b.*, I have never seen one!

Re:What's the problem?

[GreatBunzinni]

So, what exactly are they trying to achieve?

They are trying to achieve a reduction in spam. Didn't you even read the title of the article?

But it's impossible to get a reduction in spam by cutting Usenet. Web forums clean up their spam by relying on moderation and on registered accounts. You have usenet newsgroups which have been moderated and accessible under registration way before the dotcom bubble burst. In fact, some ISPs restricted the access to their usenet servers exactly the same way as they restricted access to their email servers.

So, to put it short: no, you don't get a reduction in spam by cutting Usenet. And it's idiotic that someone suggests that as a reasonable means to fight spam.

Re:What's the problem?

[Richard Steiner]

No, but nntp access to Slashdot is something that has been asked about for quite some time. :-)

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't manipulate public opinion, plaster advertising, and push agendas on usenet. Only on a site that YOU control can that happen.

There are MANY forums that I use (both technical and non technical) that would be MUCH better overall experience if they were plain old newsgroups.

Re:What's the problem?

[pclminion]

I miss being able to just read my subscriptions, along with using a scorefile/killfile. Now I have to create accounts on dozens of web pages and monitor them all separately, without being able to rank based on what I'm interested in. Each web page has its own formats and options. Yes, there are rss feeds, but that doesn't help much if you are an active poster in the community. We've gone backwards.

You call it going backwards, I call it an opportunity for somebody to step in and provide a software solution. We have these computer thingies and programming languages. With these tools I figure we can do something to your liking.

Re:What's the problem?

[shutdown -p now]

Forums let the hoster:

1. Archive messages with policies they define.

2. Moderate messages (in particular, remove them).

3. Enable features such as polls or comment moderation by the community.

Unfortunately, a lot of people these days expect some or all of those, and few even know what NNTP is. There are simply too few users using the latter to make maintaining it viable.

It does make me sad personally, though, as I did prefer the newsgroups for all the reasons you've listed (I was mostly hanging out at microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp). But I understand the business reasons for the decision.

Re:What's the problem?

[hesaigo999ca]

It is bad when they do not want to invest in getting the job done properly, so newsgroups which have always been there for ever, to help support certain aspects of user group livelihood, is now being set aside because M$ responsible for having buggy systems that allow such attacks to succeed, is now saying, because we cant fix it and are too lazy, it is easier for us just to take out the back end of the attack vector, no newsgroups, no newsgroup attacks....
why don't they just remove windows altogether, and we would have almost no malware or viruses too....lol

Re:What's the problem?

[WheelDweller]

An interesting take on the problem; it scored you 4 points, I'll be 'trolled' for mine.

Isn't Microsoft the most widely-run operating system in the world? Are they not supposed to be the most capable, therefore? How many times have we heard how we should use their software because they will control spam, make the internet safe and make computing more fun?

Each and ever time they make a release.

You'd think after 2 decades they'd get around to doing some of that. And what's the WORST PLACE to show you can't pull it off?

Oh, sure- they can do this, or don't; it's a business decision, but that's the easy first-glance.

The fact they can't keep problems at bay on their own website speaks VOLUMES. They are, running these systems on Windows machines, right?

LET THE TROLL MODERATION BEGIN!

Re:What's the problem?

[GreatBunzinni]

Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam. There is no really effective spam-control device for Usenet other than moderated groups, and it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum.

First of all, your allegation that "virtually all of the newsgroups out there", except the moderated ones, "have been completely overrun with spam" is as true as claiming that all email has been completely overrun with spam. You only happen to see spam hitting a newsgroup if you happen to rely on a usenet service provider which, quite blatantly, doesn't employ the most rudimentary spam filter available. There are quite a fair share of usenet service providers, including free ones such as aioe that do a good job filtering spam to an extent that in practice you will never come across spam.

Then your allegation that it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum doesn't hold water. After all, all web forums are moderated in some form or another, including slashdot, and that never stopped people from participating. In some extreme cases you may get a bit of lag getting your post to appear available but that doesn't happen in practice. For example, Trolltech's newsgroup server requires a registration and I believe is moderated but still my posts are made available faster than they appear in "regular" usenet groups such as comp.lang.c, which is open to all.

Moreover, Microsoft's case is one of providing technical help regarding their products. Good conversational flow doesn't quite apply there, does it?

Usenet was great in its time, but its fatal flaw turned out to be an inability to keep out spam. We fought it for years, but the fact is the spammers have won, and it's time to move on to technologies that are better able to control it, like web forums. Yes, Usenet was much nicer back in the old days before the Internet exploded, but a lot of things online were nicer then. NNTP was developed for a world where common courtesy and community policing were sufficient to correct bad behavior, but those days are gone now as the overall population of the 'net has increased exponentially and the technology of spammers has improved so that a few of them can easily drown out the many who are willing to abide by basic netiquette rules.

I can't possibly see how the "spam has won" if I never come across a spam post on the dozens newsgroups I subscribe to. If your problem is spam then you solve it by blocking it. Or did you stopped using email altogether due to spam?

And more to the point, I find email spam, which is similar to NNTP spam, to be less intrusive than some of the animated banners that some sites shove in our screen, which means that being forced to suffer through banner ads is also an inconvenience. You can always rely on plugins such as adblock but yet, you never see anyone claiming that "the web's suffers from a fatal flaw: the inability to keep out ads".

The world changed. You can either adapt to it or sit back and complain about how things were so much better then, and how kids have no respect for people's lawns anymore. Web forums may have a long way to go before they can match the feature set on Usenet 15 years ago, but they beat the hell out of today's Usenet in terms of signal to noise ratio, and for many of us that's the more important thing.

That may be true in a couple of years from now but I have to tell you that you don't quite know what you are talking about. It's true there are already some technically-oriented sites which are boasted as being such great sources of technical insight but in practice they all suck and are still way behind what some newsgroups continually provide. For example, stack overflow

Re:What's the problem?

[Darinbob]

Agreed. I loved usenet, and I hate forums. But spam killed usenet. Instead of a one-stop-shopping for all info and discussion that was the hallmark of usenet, now I have multiple web based forums with badly designed interfaces.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me recommend spam fighter for everybody here to avoid this kind of trouble with your email. It is a free program that filters your mail for you. There is also a pro version if you like the features. http://spamfighter.couponcodes.bz/ good luck everyone!

Re:What's the problem?

[valnar]

I'm pretty sure their forums will work with IE. From their point-of-view (and rightly so), it doesn't need to work with anything else.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha, troll!?!

Someone obviously resents being called a brainless fucker. Was it the 30k on credit cards that told you that, or my post pointing out that you owe more from buying shiny-shiny than you earn per annum?

Maybe you work for some corporation whose business is "web apps", and you don't like it being pointed out on slashdot (where some people genuinely understand Free/libre software) that web2.0 is an even shittier deal than boxed corpware 1.0, so you are hoping to censor?

Maybe you have just bought a long string of PCs, paid the MS tax multiple times, and don't want to think you've been ripped off?

No matter what, if you have a gripe with what I posted, reply and take my argument apart instead.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair your argument is hot air.

Many people do not have a hotmail, Live Passport account because it's webmail (which is unsafe) in the first place. Not to mention the tracking cookies, and other BS.

windowsupdate.microsoft.com doesn't require a hotmail/Live Passport account, so your claim that regularly visiting official microsoft sites is bogus as well.

You don't need hotmail/Live Passport to update.

What will end up happening is they will force everyone (maybe not at first) to have a Passport/Hotmail account. This can lock out OS's and browsers at any time.

So what you were getting before across the nntp protocol (similar to email/telnet), is now gone and now you have to submit to their control.

This news is no different than when Microsoft shut off their ftp sites for windows updates. It's about control.

Furthermore, Spam is an entirely different problem. Mostly that of the user being adept enough to cut through it and get to the meat and potatoes. We're not talking about webmail here, if your trying to filter or clean out a 100% spam filled html enabled webmail account there's a good chance your going to have to reformat if you don't have a backup. nntp isn't webmail! One can control the data flowing through. With webmail by the time it loads up your toast.

What they should have done is built the website, and advertise it in the NG's. Then if folks want to go, and it becomes popular fine.

Tearing it out scorched earth style, and replacing it with a half-measure you have to sign up for leaves the poor man's Technet subscription laid to waste. It will also drive traffic up on obscure websites with information freely available. It's disruptive and malicious.

Microsoft doesn't want NG's.
They want complete control.
That's the bottom line

Re:What's the problem?

[Baloo Uriza]

Because they could have, and should have, done so with their NNTP system. They're a software company, they could have come up with effective controls.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to export slashdot threads to a unix mailbox. So there will be no archival either.

Don't forget the whistleblower /DMCA aspect.

if you don't like a post on a CMS/BBS/FORUM/Message board, lawyers spew out DMCA takedowns.

On nntp that can't happen.

Microsoft doesn't want FTP's
Microsoft doesn't want NG's
Microsoft wants submissive Hotmail/Live Passport users
Microsoft want's complete control.

It's too bad we can't vote to forcefully change the topic to a more accurate description.

"Microsoft Wants Complete Control, Blames Spam, Kills NG's."

Problem | Reaction | Solution

Where will you be when

Kafkaesque cloud outage traps Microsoft Hotmailers Let's see you were sayin?

Re:What's the problem?

[dangitman]

The world of discussion has gotten so fragmented, and everybody's got to authenticate on each service independently.

That, and the way forums are implemented is a massive pile of recycled smeg. Terrible interfaces, lack of threading, you name it. Slashdot is pretty terrible, but compared to most other forums, it seems good. And what the fuck is up with that BBcode shit? Is HTML so hard you have to invent something else that's just as cumbersome, but non-standard?

Re:What's the problem?

[Baloo Uriza]

Thanks for being part of what's killing off newsgroups.

Re:What's the problem?

[Sicnarf]

useless, because a forum is all about it's moderators and staff.

Re:What's the problem?

[jschrod]

I would recommend to change your Usenet provider. Maybe take one where you have to pay a bit for it and who provides better service than your current provider.

With my provider, I don't see spam in the newsgroups that I subscribe to. I see less technical users leaving for their beloved Web fora, but that's actually a good thing. S2N ratio in many newsgroups almost returned back to the time before the AOL-me-too folks appeared.

Re:What's the problem?

[harlows_monkeys]

The trick is to not bother with the forums directly. Use a couple sites like reddit or hacker news. When something worthwhile shows up in forums, someone will post a link to reddit or HN (and a week later to Slashdot...). If you want to discuss it, discuss it on reddit or HN. The threading is better than most forums and the discussion is generally better.

Re:What's the problem?

[Philip_the_physicist]

It would be relatively simple to tack onto Usenet the ability to send replies which contain up- or down-votes and a description (although newsreader support would be an issue, obviously), and a moderation bot (the Scary Devil Monastery uses one, this can be a more complex version) could ignore any moderation posts to the /. groups which are not from current mods. THis would be tricky to do with a public group, but if each article were a group hosted on /.s own server. Thus this article might be slashdot.tech.spam-causes-microsoft-to-kill-newsgroups, and /. could ignore karma and prevent moderation from anyone not logged in to their server via ssl.

Of course, this is just hypothetical, although I would use it if they offered it, I don't really expect anyone to.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam.

And /. isn't overrun by spam in the form of astroturfers of every stripe?

That said, when I still supported MS, I used their MCSE newsgroup for a few months and the users themselves were the biggest bunch of spammers that I've ever seen on any newsgroup or forum. I've yet to see a bigger bunch of small-minded pricks in any one place since then. Even /. pales in comparison.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if you want to get something off of a forum you just send a DMCA notice and it is gone.

I don't see how is that any relevant. Microsoft already controls it's usenet servers. If some Microsoft drone wishes to get something out of their usenet servers then he only needs to press delete.

Also you can buy out someone's forum and easily wire that info into whatever social networking service you plan on building.
 

And thanks to Usenet every message is easily parseable and freely accessible to all. It's no coincidence that there are already quite a lot of web sites that mirror a hand full of usenet newsgroups and pass it off as their very own traffic.

Re:What's the problem?

[Ol Olsoc]

go on down to rec.radio.amateur policy, and tell me about a degraded user experience on a forum.

There's a group of seriously sick people there, including one who must have an automated system to spew out his swill. IIRC, he did over 1500 messages one day.

Crazy psycho-sexual crap. Gazillion user names, gazillion topic names, I spent more time managing my killfile than I did reading the group. A lot of the stuff spills over into other groups via crossposting. This is more than just the occasional crazie, who often provides some entertainment along with their rants, this a a massive domination of a newsgroup, rendering it useless.

And Google won't do a thing about it. The Amateur radio community just ended up abandoning it.

This one person was almost single handedly responsible for the creation of rec.radio.amateur moderated. All it takes is a team of moderators and judges to keep him out.

Newsgroups are a thing of the past.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

So then wouldn't this open up the opportunity to make a piece of software that lets you manage your "dozen's" of web pages and be able to monitor them all in a single application, its been/being done for social networking sites, i don't see why it would have to be any different with forums.

Microsoft may drop them

[jra]

I don't see that this means they're *actually* going to die, however.

That's precisely the difference between implementing them as newsgroups, and as Microsoft-"hosted" fora, in fact.

It will be interesting to see the results.

Re:Microsoft may drop them

[Linker3000]

"I don't see that this means they're *actually* going to die, however."

Paging Mr Netcraft.

surely it's about control

[Anonymous Coward]

Forums are spammed to death too. The difference here is that NNTP is archived, and searchable by third parties, a web forum can be dumped at a moments notice.

Re:surely it's about control

[captbob2002]

...and often are.

Re:surely it's about control

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no Spam in forums.

Re:surely it's about control

[gad_zuki!]

Really? I stop by the technet forums all the time and have never seen spam.

Re:surely it's about control

[macshit]

Really? I stop by the technet forums all the time and have never seen spam.

... and I read netnews via news.individual.net, and have never seen spam.

The point being, both technologies can be spammed, but largely eliminating spam is also possible with both.

Thus by saying they're making this change "to control spam," MS shows that they're either incompetent, or dishonest.

Re:surely it's about control

[Darinbob]

Newsgroups allowed anyone in. All forums I have ever seen require you to subscribe (often they're stupid enough to require you to subscribe merely to read them). So spam can be dealt with by blocking the account and all forums I've used have active moderators. Of course a spammer can open a new account (often needing a new throw-away email address to do so), but it takes time. With usenet there was no filtering up front, anyone could post anything as fast as they wanted. Of course servers could put in anti-spam heuristics, but they tended to be even less effective than email spam filters.

Yeah... right...

[Spazztastic]

"Let's hope the spam posts and voting bots in their forums remain controllable."

Like that will actually do anything. Spamming is just as much of a problem on forums as it is on newsgroups, maybe not as bad since they use captcha. Even then, captcha has been defeated time and time again. This is just a ploy to force people to register with them.

Re:Yeah... right...

[Monkeedude1212]

Microsoft has decided that upon registering for any of their forums, you must complete and pass a turing test. Twice.

Re:Yeah... right...

[John Hasler]

> Microsoft has decided that upon registering for any of their forums, you
> must complete and pass a turing test.

So only AIs that can successfully masquarade as human will be allowed on the "forums"? How will that cut down spam? Who do you think posts most of it?

Re:Yeah... right...

[safetyinnumbers]

Microsoft has decided that upon registering for any of their forums, you must complete and pass a turing test. Twice.

Surely, for the second one, any human will say: "I've just done this test!"

Meh.

[Pojut]

Chances are it's because the forums will be more easily moderated, whether it be because of forum software or other tools that are available.

Does TFA mention anything about which forum technology they will be using? Or are they going to write their own?

Slashdot, StackOverflow, etc.

[FlyingBishop]

So essentially Microsoft is 10 years behind the curve? Why hasn't MS had forums? Why aren't they exploring crowdsourcing and open bug trackers?

Re:Slashdot, StackOverflow, etc.

[TimSSG]

You must understand that bug tracking for
Microsoft might have issues. What is the normal
max number of bugs per application; I can see MS
exceeding the normal range tested in Open
Source Bug tracker. Tim S.

Re:Slashdot, StackOverflow, etc.

[El Lobo]

Hmm.. many people are screaming because evil MS now have forums. Another half is crying because evil MS now have forums. Great!

Re:Slashdot, StackOverflow, etc.

[El Lobo]

OK, I fucked my post out... many people are screaming because evil MS now have forums. Another half is crying because evil MS did not implement forums earlier. Great!

I'll better post about how come evil slashdot doesn't allow post editing, year 2010. What's this, Usenet?

Re:Slashdot, StackOverflow, etc.

[V for Vendetta]

Why hasn't MS had forums?

Well, this pretty much looks like forums to me.

Re:Slashdot, StackOverflow, etc.

[strstr]

Also this.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/default.aspx

Re:Slashdot, StackOverflow, etc.

[shutdown -p now]

So essentially Microsoft is 10 years behind the curve? Why hasn't MS had forums?

It does. For a while, there has been both forums and newsgroups. I believe that they are even connected via a bridge.

Why aren't they exploring crowdsourcing and open bug trackers?

It's there for some products, though not all (mostly for developer-related stuff).

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like newsgroups are obsolete or anything. Does anyone still post on usenet?

Re:Wow

[robably]

No. Nobody posts on Usenet. It is of no interest to you or anyone else. We can go about our business.

{ { { waves hand } } }

Re:Wow

[Frosty Piss]

Does anyone still post on usenet?

Mostly Wearez and child / animal porn.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok.. that's a broad generalization ...
"Usenet is dead" is a major troll by the groups (ISP/Cable/Media/Software companies) who resent the free communications of information as a whole.

Yes there are warez and porn groups. There are also groups supporting obsolete and abandoned software and hardware that some of us still use. A major screwup is more likely to be discussed in a Usenet forum than a Microsoft controlled one, simply because the urge to "keep their image clean" will ALWAYS override the benefit of free discussion.

Yes you have troll issues and spam issues... I get that in my Yahoo and Google Groups as well.

Corporate sponsored and managed groups will never have the freedom to speak against their corporate masters unlike Usenet, the Speakers Corner of the web.

Some of us like the wilderness ...some others prefer the walled garden with Apple(tm) "protecting" you.

and a "binaries" forum too??? lol

[GuyFawkes]

as subject, cos I can't talk about nntp

Control

[wowbagger]

It's about control - you can control a forum, you cannot control a newsgroup.

This has good aspects: with control you can kill spam, bounce griefers and trolls, and generally promote a more thoughtful discussion.

This has bad aspects: with control you can kill dissent, bounce critics and whistleblowers, and generally promote a more "corporate" discussion.

In the modern business environment, business managers are conditioned to seek control - it's no different Microsoft or Apple or IBM or RedHat, it's just a matter of degree.

Re:Control

[mdwh2]

Of course you can control a newsgroup - it's Usenet that you can't control, but there's no reason why you can't run an account-required NNTP server with your own newsgroups, where you delete what you like.

It's unclear from the article what Microsoft were doing. Surely the latter - if it was on Usenet, surely they don't even have the control to delete them?

Re:Control

[vbraga]

I believe it refers to the server news.microsoft.com (or nntp.microsoft.com, I used it a long time ago) that hosts microsoft.* groups.

And if I recall correctly, they already have a web interface to them. So, they're probably just closing the NNTP interface due to amount of spam. No problems, IMHO.

Re:Control

[GreatBunzinni]

Newsgroups can be moderated and have been moderated for ages and if you really want to you can just as easily put up a usenet server that requires the users to register an account. It has been done in the past and it is still being done up to this minute. As usenet is nothing but an interface to access discussion data, obviously it doesn't offer any disadvantage. In fact, web forums have been continuously failing to provide the very basic functionality any usenet client has been providing for ages and every little feature that is implemented in a web forum ends up being terribly bloated (i.e., relying on tons of scripts whose code must be downloaded each time someone accesses the site) and terribly underwhelming.

So, if usenet doesn't bring any disadvantage in that oblivious fight against spam, it has been superior to web forums since it's inception and doesn't take any control out of the provider then what can possibly be driving this measure?

Re:Control

[sznupi]

Though, at some point, the change in degree of control becomes qualitative, not merely quantitative. And heck, we have just fine CentOS/Scientific Linux plus RedHat funds and links to Fedora from its homesite.

Re:Control

[pclminion]

Newsgroups can be moderated and have been moderated for ages and if you really want to you can just as easily put up a usenet server that requires the users to register an account.

Quite a few people, myself included, find moderated groups offensive. It has a ring of "Papers, please" to it. Yeah, there are a lot of spammers out there. But assuming I'm a spammer until you can prove otherwise? Fuck you.

Re:Control

[Anonymous Coward]

How can change of control not be qualitative? Do you believe that these changes can be measured in quantity, as in "Moving from usenet to forums will give Microsoft 47 control, as opposed to their current control of 12." ? I'd like to know how these quantitative measures of control are derived, it would interest me greatly. Because I can't figure out how these things can be put into numbers.

Re:Control

[sznupi]

Broader meaning; values don't have to be easily assignable for the difference between them to be only of quantity which does not really change the essential nature of the phenomena. But at some point the difference becomes so great that the essential qualities differ vastly.

For an extreme example - consider two objects moving in the atmosphere
a) one has the speed of, say, 430km/h and the second - 470. Yup, quite noticeable difference...only it doesn't really change that much
b) one has 30km/h and the other - mach 10
(or: we all have our worse days; but only from certain point, from certain notable mood change and/or sustained chemical inbalances in the brain we call it "depression"; how would you assign really reliable, not at all arbitrary values in this case? And yet qualitative vs. quantitative change is often used when talking about mood swings, then disorders, then illnesses)

Re:Control

[Ol Olsoc]

Your vision of newsgroups is almost correct. but completely wrong.

Setting up a moderated newsgroup is not just a matter of getting together and clicking your fingers.

I was involved in setting one up, and it's quite a bit of work, both before and after setup.

As for the real reason that forums are becoming more popular:

1. There are some pernicious folk on Netnews who do a pretty good job of getting around the rules. I've seen them dominate and decimate legitimate groups to the point of abandonment. Hundreds and hundreds of postings a day. We couldn't get his mail service to do anything about it. It was just what we had to accept.

2. So, you want moderation. It is many orders of magnitude easier to create a forum than it is to start a moderated newsgroup. For a newsgroup, you have to start a process through the Big 8, then justify the reason for it's existence. They are very, very thorough, and if they aren't convinced, you don't get a new moderated newsgroup. Then if you get the newsgroup, there is a extensive protocol you have to follow. rejected posts can be appealed, and you have to hear them out. While this is actually a good thing (I'm a moderator for a newsgroup) it does take some work. Point is, you don't "just do" this, it's a fairly extensive process, and requires people who are willing to work as a team, and put in a lot of time and effort approving or rejecting posts, and are willing to take part in that process.

To make a forum, it's a whole lot easier. You set up the software, and at least in the forum I made, it was done from a control panel, took 5 minutes. Another option is a Mailman forum, I administer one of those too. Overwhelmingly easier, and that is going to attract a lot of people who don't want to put in all the effort to create, set up and administer a moderated newsgroup.

I can't blame them

[MBGMorden]

As a former very avid Usenet user, I really can't blame them. The medium is falling out of favor precisely because most of the groups are filled with junk.

I don't get why the spammers even bother anymore though. People on Usenet tend to be experienced users - few people just accidentally wander there anymore. These type of users HATE spam. They can't possibly be getting much, if any, of a response from their efforts there. Why waste the effort in the first place?

Re:I can't blame them

[emurphy42]

Because various web sites that echo Usenet thereby become link farms?

Re:I can't blame them

[mujadaddy]

Low investment. You might as well ask why they spam at all.

Re:I can't blame them

[sznupi]

In the first place, the effort is very small; it takes little to spawn spam.

Re:I can't blame them

[ferd_farkle]

"most of the groups are filled with junk"

Quite true. There are >40,000 groups in my .newsrc, but the handfull of groups I subscribe to have very little spam, and that is mostly easily filtered out. I think it just might depend on what groups one is familiar with. Certainly nobody cares about "most of them". Most of what is on the Web is junk, too.

Re:I can't blame them

[GreatBunzinni]

As a former very avid Usenet user, I really can't blame them. The medium is falling out of favor precisely because most of the groups are filled with junk.

That doesn't make any sense. The perceived problem with usenet spam is exactly the same as the email spam, as it's a problem which grossly depends on the service provider. For example, if your ISP fails to filter yout the spam so that you get 10 spams a day then does that make email a "medium which is falling out of favour"? Obviously it doesn't.

As Google does a decent job fighting spam on Google Mail, some usenet providers such as my ISP and even AIOE do a good job filtering the crap out of newsgroups. Moreover, usenet spam is even less of a problem than email spam. Besides being able to employ spam filters (possibly even the same ones which are applied to email) it is also possible to moderate newsgroups, exactly the same way that any web forum is moderates. In fact, its even easier to moderate a usenet group. Adding to that, you can also offer usenet access only to registered accounts, something which can't be done with email.

So, summing things up, if spam doesn't make email suck then why should it make usenet, a medium which is harder to attack, suffer more from it? It doesn't.

Re:I can't blame them

[MBGMorden]

So, summing things up, if spam doesn't make email suck then why should it make usenet, a medium which is harder to attack, suffer more from it? It doesn't.

You're not thinking the problem out. With email, each and every spammer that decides to spam you has to find out your email somehow. Sometimes they share, sometimes they don't, but the more spammers find out your email address, the more spam you get.

Compare with Usenet - when you connect to a server, you can just ask for the list of current newsgroups and it'll give the whole list back (kinda necessary by the way it works). They don't have to discover anything.

Also, Google and most other email filters provide some level of bayesian filtering ability. You can say "yes this is spam", and "no this isn't" for individual emails and it'll learn on your preferences. The sheer number of people and topics available on Usenet make that very difficult to employ here.

When you factor in that a post to usenet propagates across all servers, it's far, far easier to attack than a single email address. Trust me, even on a good dedicated Usenet server (I've used several - most recently Astraweb, but I've also used Teranews and Giganews in the past), any group that is not moderated is FLOODED with spam, and the groups that ARE moderated can take 2-3 days for your posts to actually show up, making it more hassle than it's worth.

It's become easier to just use web forums for most things.

Re:I can't blame them

[Anonymous Coward]

email a "medium which is falling out of favour"

this might surprise soimeone who still uses usenet, but yes email is falling out of favor. personal communication has moved to social networking and IM, and even business mail is becoming useless crackberry noise.

Re:I can't blame them

[DerekLyons]

For the same reason they spam in the first place - the cost to spam is virtually zero, so any result provides profit way out of proportion to the effort.

Re:I can't blame them

[John Hasler]

> I think it just might depend on what groups one is familiar with.

It also depends on who you get your feed from. Some providers are much better at filtering spam than others (with ISPs generally doing no filtering at all)

Re:I can't blame them

[Comboman]

As Google does a decent job fighting spam on Google Mail, some usenet providers such as my ISP and even AIOE do a good job filtering the crap out of newsgroups.

You're lucky to have a good ISP. Most ISPs treat usenet like a red-headed stepchild, many block binary and alt groups, have cut back on retention times/number of groups and some have even dropped support for usenet entirely, telling their customers to "use google groups".

Re:I can't blame them

[John Hasler]

> As a former very avid Usenet user, I really can't blame them. The medium is
> falling out of favor precisely because most of the groups are filled with
> junk.

Then why isn't the Web falling out of favor? Almost all Web pages and most Web forums are also filled with junk.

Re:I can't blame them

[macshit]

Trust me, even on a good dedicated Usenet server (I've used several - most recently Astraweb, but I've also used Teranews and Giganews in the past), any group that is not moderated is FLOODED with spam

Try using news.individual.net, they do a great job of controlling spam -- there seems to be almost zero spam on any of the newsgroups I've read there (few of which moderated).

Re:I can't blame them

[bcrowell]

I don't get why the spammers even bother anymore though. People on Usenet tend to be experienced users - few people just accidentally wander there anymore. These type of users HATE spam. They can't possibly be getting much, if any, of a response from their efforts there. Why waste the effort in the first place?

What effort? It doesn't cost any effort to spam a usenet group. You download a script and start it running. It spams every group in the usenet hierarchy with ads for shoes or handbags. This is the same principle as with email spam. When the incremental cost of sending a spam is zero, there is no incentive to worry about targeting your spams, trying to make them effective, etc.

Re:I can't blame them

[jtownatpunk.net]

Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.

The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.

PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.

The only countries NOT qualifying are: Mexico; India; P.R. China;
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and
Vietnam.

Lottery registration will take place soon. 55,000 Green Cards will be
given to those who register correctly. NO JOB IS REQUIRED.

THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS
NOW!!

For FREE information via Email, send request to
cs...@indirect.com

---------

I also remember the day AOL flipped the switch on usenet access. Ugh.

Re:I can't blame them

[jschrod]

That's why I use a dedicated Usenet provider where I find virtually no spam in any newsgroups that I subscribe to. Of course, I have to pay for that added service, but that's a good investment.

Re:I can't blame them

[jschrod]

even on a good dedicated Usenet server (I've used several - most recently Astraweb, but I've also used Teranews and Giganews in the past), any group that is not moderated is FLOODED with spam

If they are FLOODED with spam, they may be dedicated, but they are not good. In the newsgroups of my Usenet provider appears virtually no spam.

Sue them! Class Action Style!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha

Repost?

[erroneous]

I think this a repost from 1995.

Didn't *everyone* stop using newsgroups about then?

Re:Repost?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just what they want you to think.

Re:Repost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erk no... but does this mean I might need to upgrade from Lynx? I don't see why I should as Microsoft's forums look ok....

Re:Repost?

[selven]

1995? I'm pretty sure it's at least 6000 September by now.

user data

[butterflysrage]

gotta catch em all! You can't do much targeted marketing to newsgroups.

SPAM in forums? Are you kidding me?

[Yvan256]

If you want to see REAL spam, log into a game of Diablo 2. There you will see the true evil of spamming.

Google Reader

[imakemusic]

I have the Google Reader widget on my iGoogle homepage. I'd recommend it to anyone as reading truncated story titles like "Spam Causes Microsoft To Kill" can really brighten up your day.

the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[circletimessquare]

is all the godawful amounts of east european kiddie porn spam in the alt.binaries area

you would have thought law enforcement would notice and would have shut down nntp on that fact alone. but i guess nntp still inhabits that technical area of the web beyond the average user, so i guess the media and the soccer moms with their awareness of facebook, twitter, and nothing else, they're just unaware there's this horribly huge amount of freely accessible anonymous kiddie porn spamming going on. freely accessible, i guess, if you know how to download a newsgroup reader and enter the name of your internet provider's nntp server in a dialog box. which i guess is all the "technical hurdles" you need to make nntp completely obscure to most people, certainly public awareness, even law enforcement

don't click on ANY images in the alt.binaries area unless you want to unwittingly download child pornography onto your computer. its in completely unrelated groups, and it is purposefully mislabeled as something else

baffling and frightening problem

Re:the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[kaizendojo]

"But officer, I downloaded those 500 megs of kiddie porn by accident! See, I even posted about it in slashdot!"

Re:the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[GreatBunzinni]

Complaining that NNTP should be shut down because you see east european kiddie porn spam in some newsgroups is exactly like complaining that HTTP should be shut down because you see european kiddie porn in some sites: it doesn't make any sense and you only succeed in coming out as an ignorant fool.

And here's a tip: if you don't want to see east european kiddie porn then don't follow newsgroups/sites that post that sort of crap.

Re:the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[colfer]

Difference is that NNTP binaries are stored at the ISP.

Re:the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[Anonymous Coward]

baffling and frightening problem

What's baffling about it? It's obviously being put there by LEAs to increase the number of random kiddie porn busts they can make. I imagine the typical scenario goes like this:

1) unsuspecting guy batch downloads from a newsgroup,
2) some kiddie porn gets caught in the net,
3) guy either forgets about the download, doesn't look at all the images and misses it, or deletes the kiddie porn but doesn't clear his recycle bin,
4) computer goes south,
5) guy takes it in for repairs,
6) techs find kiddie porn and call the cops,
7) profit!

I immediately recognized what was going on when this started years ago, but the fact that it's still going on years later, that it's in all the erotic binaries groups, and that it's the same batch of unassuming softcore pictures being posted over and over again, pretty much confirms it.

Re:the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[Anonymous Coward]

Law enforcement did notice. They're the ones posting a lot of the spam so they can trap perverts with honey pot websites.

Re:the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you are actually telling the truth... way to advertise child porn!

Re:the one thing that amazes me about nntp

[FunkSoulBrother]

Consider the fuss if Comcast said tommorow that they would no longer serve data via HTTP to their userbase. Now consider the minor, tech site, nerdy fuss that would occur if they said the exact same about NNTP. That is the difference.

Of course you can't shut down a protocol, but while I don't want it, it baffles me as well that any major ISP is running a news server in 2010. It would be like an airline still offering smoking in the cabin.

Not Just Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Read directly from the source:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/default.mspx#ECB

There are a myriad of reasons, and "spam" isn't even the top reason.

Re:Not Just Spam

[ckaminski]

Slashdotted?

Fixing it...

[gjh]

Of course, it IS still just about possible for one of us to fix USENET. If we cared enough.

- A distributed ratings system that works, and allows matching of your preferences to people with similar preferences.
- A better standard for signing articles, and ownership of virtual websites where threads or subforums can only be started by the owner
- Standards for structured documents and so on.
- Incorporation and acceptance into multiple CMS's so that you can actually read existing forums through NNRP

So far, in the 15 years since this has been an issue, noone has cared enough to fix it. Pity.

Can we give Microsoft *some* credit?

[GodfatherofSoul]

I was an avid newsgroup poster years ago, but the spam and typical lack of administration ruined it for me. Newsgroups were fun and I'll fondly remember downloading pics of Julia Taylor from alt.binaries.redheads or whatever, but time marches on.

Global Reputation System

[Colin Smith]

The Internet's missing link.

 

Re:Global Reputation System

[Yoozer]

That's a bitchun Whuffie score you have there, son.

Stupid Spammers

[Culture20]

Remember, a successful parasite doesn't kill the host, or make the host want to kill itself. Ramp down your spam relays or you're going to lose your host media. Eventually even email will become a burden again; I'm having to check three tiered spam filters for legit mail, and more spam is getting through all three while a little legit mail is getting caught in different filters.

Re:Stupid Spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is when you get several different parasites competing among themselves for the host...

there once was a time

[circletimessquare]

i could go to something like alt.binaries.pictures.breasts and download a bunch of pictures of tits

i do that now, and i get naked eastern european children

it was accidental, and its not funny

Re:there once was a time

[bughunter]

Right. Now you can go to 4chan /s/ and download a bunch of pictures of tits.

Usenet hasn't so much evolved as it has migrated... or perhaps mutated.

(If you want naked children, download your tits from /b/ -- it's not accidental, because someone thinks it's funny.)

That works for slackers...

[meburke]

...but there are people who know how to actually work the knowledge contained in newsgroups, and these people will be be severely obstructed.

I subscribe to a number of newsgroups covering many technical subjects I'm very interested in. Using just the Microsoft newsgroups as an example, I have scripts that allow me to input keywords and conceptual ideas, search all the newsgroups simultaneously, and then present the relevant posts and threads prioritized by content. This cuts my browsing for relevant info by about 90%. (This saved me weeks of time on Siverlight and Expression alone!) Even the web-based MS Groups search system is faster than any tools I've seen in the forums.

My alternative seems to be to visit each individual forum separately, even if I do a forum search from the MS websites. Crap! what a time-waster. I expect I'll have to spend a lot of time browsing rather than getting relevant results. Until companies start implementing more OWL and semantic web enhancements, forums seem to be largely deficient compared to newsgroups.

BTW, I use a Bayesian filter for spam filtering, a Bayesian search function for first-level search, and a Neural Net for second-level relevancy. I almost NEVER have to contend with spam. (I wrote my own NN, but I got the idea from Logic Line by Thunderstone. http://www.thunderstone.com/texis/site/pages/ )

I hope MS reconsiders.

ALL image newsgroups post that crap

[circletimessquare]

constantly, and ALL of it is purposefully mislabeled as something else. its not labelled "kiddie porn"

if you got a picture group devoted to redheads there will be a picture labelled "on topic: attractive redhead", "mature redhead"... and you get... kiddie porn. and this is 3 out of 7 links, not a random few

it would be as if you went to nytimes.com, clicked on a number of articles purporting to be about breaking news "goldman sachs head defends company", "times square bomber was family man" and you instead got a snuff film on 3 out of 7 stories you clicked

that's the actual http allegory you are searching for. would you consider this more accurate allegory to be a genuine problem?

Re:ALL image newsgroups post that crap

[Anonymous Coward]

constantly, and ALL of it is purposefully mislabeled as something else. its not labelled "kiddie porn"

You get what you pay for. Want uncensored newsgroups? You get everything: from mp3s to warez to CP. Plenty of other NNTP providers that offer clean NGs. From text only to filtered bins w/out CP. Is as simple as that dude.

Have had the same conversations about BBSs

[night_flyer]

the web does things better than a BBS.

- NewGroups/FIDO vs Web Forums... IMO Web win... the age of Bluewave mailer programs and its ilk are past
- Download BBS Files vs Download files from the web... again the Web Wins, it susually easier to browese via google for the files you want (especially pictures) than to log onto a BBS to get the File_ID.diz info or even just some sysops description.
- the only Area in which the BBSs win are with the door games, and only if you like text style games, otherwise the Web wins again.

sometimes things just are just no longer useful

Re:Have had the same conversations about BBSs

[Anonymous Coward]

- the only Area in which the BBSs win are with the door games

http://www.quakelive.com/

Are you joking? J-Slashcode is awful!

[Anonymous Coward]

250 comments at a time? MINUTES of time required to load more on a T1? CPU usage above 80% (of 2.33GHz) while loading? The new Javascript-based Slashcode is awful.
"And Slashdot still seems to have problems on every browser I've tried..." is NOT the hallmark of "pretty good" forum software!

Re:Are you joking? J-Slashcode is awful!

[mdwh2]

Well yes indeed - it's pretty good only in terms of forum software, but nothing compared to using a news client. The only website that comes close to offering these features takes tonnes of resources to run.

Spam is unbelievable on newsgroups

[jridley]

I used to follow several newsgroups, but gave up on them years ago because the spam was simply unbearable. In the groups I was hanging out in, probably 70% of the messages were spam.

Re:Spam is unbelievable on newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Groups does a pretty good job of filtering it out.

Isn't Spamming Usenet a Waste of Time?

[CohibaVancouver]

I can see why email spam persists - People are still lured in by offers of cheap software, pornography, 'free smilies' and whatever - But usenet spam remains a mystery to me. I just don't understand why spammers take the energy to bother spamming usenet. Presumably usenet users are a higher class of user. While email spam presumably continues to yield good results, I just can't imagine usenet spam yields a single sale... What's the point?

Re:Isn't Spamming Usenet a Waste of Time?

[Brett Buck]

Its cheap (free) and easy. Even if there is *one* sale, its worth it.

Re:Isn't Spamming Usenet a Waste of Time?

[Culture20]

usenet spam remains a mystery to me. I just don't understand why spammers take the energy to bother spamming usenet. Presumably usenet users are a higher class of user. While email spam presumably continues to yield good results, I just can't imagine usenet spam yields a single sale...

What if it were a spam ad for "Super low interest rate mortgage. Buy your own place, get out of your mother's basement. Impress women!"? I'd google the company's name at least.

Re:Isn't Spamming Usenet a Waste of Time?

[koro666]

As one commenter put it earlier, lots of websites scrape Usenet posts where it ends up on the web, making it "become a linkfarm" as the guy put it.

That would be my guess as why...

User Friendly

[strstr]

Looks like they want something a bit easier to use and more user friendly...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Time to bring back usenet

[bpechter]

Time to bring back point to point newsfeeds which limit access. Spam control by knowing exactly who you'll feed -- and who you cut off for spam.

Bring back the days before Eternal September and the great renaming.

Re:Time to bring back usenet

[Obfuscant]

Time to bring back point to point newsfeeds which limit access. Spam control by knowing exactly who you'll feed -- and who you cut off for spam.

Tried. Failed.

UsenetII was supposed to do exactly that. Limited feeds only to sites who promised to follow the rules. Rules. Protocols.

Leaked like a sieve. It may still be in existence, I don't know. It may be some vast underground secret society, but it never came close to replacing Usenet, which was the goal.

If it were Oracle...

[Anonymous Coward]

>The Register calls it 'killing newsgroups' but Microsoft eloquently calls it 'the evolution of communities.'

And if it were Oracle, they would call it "Desupporting obsolescent technology" and make you sign a bunch of new contracts. And whatever they switch you to will have been designed by a clearly dysfunctional committee.

i guess you've never heard of occam's razor

[circletimessquare]

your current thinking seems to be: "given a number of explanations as to why something is, pick the explanation that most matches a plot device of a bad hollywood movie"

believe it or not, what happens in movies is not instructive as to reality

uh... no

[circletimessquare]

this would be unethical

sort of like law enforcement giving people heroin in order to arrest them for being drug addicts

law enforcement cannot deal drugs or deal kiddie porn

of course some bad elements of law enforcement do unethical things. but rogue law enforcement can't post tons of kiddie porn for years without the ethical law enforcement (the majority) taking notice

Kermit

[sgt scrub]

Ha! Now you guys know how us kermit users felt :p

child pornography is not a joke

[circletimessquare]

really

Re:child pornography is not a joke

[bughunter]

Oh, I agree entirely. But the fact remains that there are people who think it's funny to trick you into downloading CP.

Anyone from Google Groups reading this thread?

[Man On Pink Corner]

If so, can you comment on why Google makes it so amazingly difficult to flag Usenet messages as spam? Why don't you include a "Report spam" button next to every post?

Re:Derp

[SnarfQuest]

One or two nutcases looking for parts for his time machine in alt.fuzzy.bunnies doesn't bother me too much, but thousands of fake viagra ads every day in every single newsgroup is a real killer.

Re:Derp

[Darinbob]

No, I think usenet had much better tools than the majority of web based forums I've seen. Every single web forum has a different interface, the majority have bad interface, extremely few can accurately remember what articles you've read or not without getting confused, very few handle branching within threads, and the vast majority have huge amounts of wasted space around the actual text (user icons/avatars, signatures, side bars, etc). You have your own interface with usenet, you can choose what you think is best (even web based if you want), whereas with forums you have to put up with whatever interface they give you.

Then there's the mere fact that I have to go to more than one forum in the first place that ignores me. One for game 1, one for game 2, ten for one tech topic, one for comics, 5 for a tv show, etc. I have to check each one to see if there's something new. If I want to join a temporary topic (new car for instance) I have to find the right forum to handle it, then remember to check it regularly to see if my question ever gets answers (most likely it won't). In usenet it was one place for everything.

Usenet was also highly regarded and authoritative in many places - you could chat with J. Michael Straczynski or Terry Pratchett, argue with RMS about emacs features, get answers to obscure C questions from people who were on the standards committees, etc. Many well regarded FAQs came from usenet.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Their fault

[unity100]

its their fault. after all these years one would think that people would have realized - never entrust anything with microsoft. theyll pull the plug on you if they think they are not having what they want, and it just needs decision of an mid upper level manager. they have got away with all the stunts they pulled up till today, so they are not hesitant in doing this over and over. they dont worry about PR at all.

dont get worked up - noone needs to recount all the stunts they pulled on their partners and customers in order not to be considered trolling anymore. it has become irrelevant.