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."
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.
Newsgroups had facilities for controlling spam before Microsoft was even aware of the Internet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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...
Because various web sites that echo Usenet thereby become link farms?
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
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.