Re: Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.

Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> writes:

Gelato <gelato@.is.invalid> writes:

On Sat, 24 Feb 2024 20:33:23 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:

>

1995 is not only before Google Groups, it's before Google existed at
all.  Google the company was founded in 1998.  Deja News wasn't
acquired by Google until 2001.  The original spam problems on Usenet
didn't have anything to do with Google.

>

What is hard to understand is the nntp news admins who required a login
& password were apparently able to control spammers, so why couldn't
Google?

>
Spam filtering requires ongoing effort since it's adversarial (spammers
adapt), and Google stopped caring about Google Groups years ago.  I
suspect the service has been mostly running on autopilot for a while.
It will be interesting to see how well other servers continue to hold up
against spam now that all the spammers will be looking for new injection
points.

They won't. If there was any real purpose in this spam except of
destroying newsgroups, it was an attempt to affect Google search. Now
when there is no major web interface to Usenet, there is also no reason
to spam Usenet in hopes that it will appear somewhere in the search.