jim

We're seeing more and more crossposting here which impacts adversely on
our core group RAMN. Shown below is a message I sent to the creators of
Thunderbird, my news and mail client. My desire is to establish a grass
roots efforts to regain control of our newsgroups. Whether you use
Thunderbird, Outlook, or any other news reader I suggest you send in
something similar to get the minds working on a fix.

Thanks

Chief Jim


Controlling Crossposting

I'm submitting to you my idea of a feature that would enhance Thunderbird.

I've been a regular user of the Usenet newsgroups for many years. In
fact I'm the founder of one REC hierarchy level group;
rec.aviation.military.naval. There exists a problem which I hope the
Mozilla community will address which others have overlooked.

For many the largest single annoyance is dealing with spam. Personal
observation is that a high percentage of the spammed messages are being
crossposted to numerous newsgroups. While most newsreaders have
methods to control spam none have incorporated controls against
crossposting.

Spamming within newsgroups has been a known problem for many years.
Filters and kill files focus on objectionable content or the
objectionable sender. Faulty concept as the spam must get thru once
before any effort can be made for blocking. Further many munge their
sender ID or alter spellings in order to defeat the filter settings.
Net result being continuous tweaking of the filters.

Yet a common trait of many spammers is totally overlooked, crossposting.
These folks tend to address multiple groups, often totally unrelated,
with undesired messages. For newsgroups trying to remain on topic this
is a severe intrusion.

Could the programming community of the Mozilla Foundation come up with a
filter option or extension that restricts downloading only those
messages solely addressed to the subscribed group? Here is an example
from my own newsgroup. Newsgroups header:

Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military.naval, rec.aviation.military,
soc.history.war.misc, soc.history.what-if,

Note the "," used separating the various newsgroups. If a filter option
could be developed looking for that comma, the end user could then block
any messages addressed to more than one newsgroup. Only messages
intended solely for that newsgroup would get through. Selecting MORE in
the Filter Rules might enable the user to selectively permit newsgroups
than may be crossposted while eliminating messages which have more than
those specified. Using my sample above; rec.aviation.military is chosen
as approved. Any message sent to rec.aviation.military.naval AND
rec.aviation.military would be approved. If the message was addressed
to any additional newsgroups the entire message would be rejected.
Could it be this simple?

Such a feature would truly enhance newsgroup activity by better keeping
each on topic. Obviously someone wishing to repost the message on a
singular basis one newsgroup at a time would not be blocked. But for now
that isn't the problem.

guy alcala

<snip>

Jim, some newsreaders allow you to filter out messages posted to more than a
certain number of newsgroups, precisely to defeat cross-posted garbage. The
old version (4.72) of Netscape I'm still using doesn't allow this, but I know
that other newsreaders do. If you ask over on rec.aviation.military or
sci.military.naval I'm sure someone will be able to point you towards one that
will do this. Most people seem to find that filtering any message posted to
more than say 3 newsgroups gets rid of the spam and off-topic political rants.

Lacking that capability I either have to set a filter for the subject once it
shows up, or else hit "Mark Thread as Read" manually for the junk; either
consumes some minimal but sometimes annoying amount of time. And killfiling
the most obnoxious posters also works, but again takes a little time putting
them into filters for each newsgroup I read, especially as some of them
continuously change names to avoid being permanently killfiled. One bozo, in
his various incarnations, has now just about filled up four of my sender
killfile lists (each of five names) all by himself. But he's a minor
annoyance, as I just add his new alias to the list or begin a new one whenever
he assumes a new variant -- it's the people who I'm loathe to killfile and who
should know better but who respond to his posts anyway, who generate the
majority of posts on a subject he started.

Guy

yeff

nfilter. It's a proxy for your newsreader that greatly extends your
ability to killfile. The FAQ will show you how to filter on crossposts:
<http://www.nfilter.org/>.

There's also Hamster, another proxy. I've never used it but I
understand it's pretty powerful. It's page is a mixture of both German
and English so don't think you're at the wrong language (like I did)
when you first check it out: <http://www.elbiah.de/hamster/pg/>

--

-Jeff B.
zoomie at fastmail dot fm

greasy rider

On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 19:23:29 -0400, Jim <chief_jim@go.com>
postulated :

(snipped)

(snipped)


Forte Agent / Group / Properties / Crossposts