comp.lang.lisp is 95% Spam

By Xah Lee. Date:

today, comp.lang.lisp is 95% spam.

let's help save it. Regardless what newsgroup readers you use, when you do your daily newsgroup reading, please take 15 seconds to go to: [ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/topics ] , then, click on the “Report as spam” for the 10 spam posts that shows on the first page.

Thanks.

yes i agree that Google care, and do something about this.

The click spam feature was added recently, perhaps 6 months ago, that indicates they do care, even if it is not that effective.

also, how effective it is depends of course on how many people report spam. For groups like comp.lang.lisp, many are old timers, don't use Google, and the readership is already comparatively very small. So, it can get worse.

another thing might be interesting is that the spam rate seems to depends on the newsgroup too. For example, comp.lang.lisp is now 95% spam, but however, comp.lang.python gets almost no spam at least as shown in Google group. This probably has to do with number of users, and also that comp.lang.python is mirrored with python's mailing list.

technology marches on by changing needs. In the 1990s or before, newsgroup is effectively the only medium and technology of subject oriented online forum. (besides a few commercial ones, for example, CompuServe) Thru the years since 1990s which i personally lived thru, other tech of communication came into being that became widely adopted, roughly in chronological order: mailing lists, irc, faq-o-matic (a pre-cursor to wiki), Instant messaging, blogs, wiki, social network sites, YouTube, Twitter, and today much of these are all intermingled and inter-connected. For example, much sites that do any type of communication often has mailing list, web feed (rss/atom), web interface, instant messaging, all together as one integrated technology, not as much as independent technologies. (For example, Facebook, much of Google's many services) Voice and video chat and conferencing is today almost everywhere too.

one point i would like to note that is, if Google didn't provide the newsgroup service in 2001 (or the DejaNews didn't start it), newsgroup might have gone the ways of dinosaur, much like many unix net tech such as who, talk, finger, gopher.

Deja News logo 1997
Deja News logo 1997

Originally posted to comp.lang.lisp at: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/bc9f9552e3dae7e4 2012-01-13