Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
Living With a Nerd
Like you actually read Microsoft's usenet forums..
Put up or shut up, post your kill file.
Otherwise it didn't happen.
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?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
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
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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?