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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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

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.

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.

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

[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?

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?

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: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.