On Jun 24, 10:48*am, Mizter T wrote:

On Jun 23, 11:34*pm, John B wrote:

On Jun 23, 11:24*pm, Adrian wrote:

Nevertheless, Google shows that 11 spams got successfully posted to the
group on 22 June and 1 got successfully posted to uk.railway on the same
day, so there seems to be something different going on.

Indeed. Google Groups is ****, and doesn't filter spam out.

That's not true - it effectively filters spam from u.r and not from
u.t.l.

I suspect it's got an annoying "if x people complain about it, it's
probably spam" detector, which u.r's greater readership activates more
rapidly.

Lesson: report it.

I did just that and went through a period of reporting each and every
spam message that appeared on Google Groups - for a while, this seemed
to be quite effective and the spam messages disappeared fairly
quickly, then they stopped disappearing. I came to the same conclusion
as you - that it depends upon other people reporting spam too, though
I did wonder whether there had been a change of personnel and the new
bod simply wasn't interested, or otherwise the new bod had quickly
grown weary of spam hunting. Anyway I'll report all the current spam,
if others do the same then we'll see what happens.

(To report spam in Google Groups, click on "More options" on the
offending message, then "Report this message" which will open up a new
screen in a new window/tab, select "This message is spam" and add some
type of description - I normally said something like "This is
definitely spam" or some such, and copy-and-pasted it into that field
for all the offending messages.)

And voila... much of the recent spam has vanished. A bit earlier on I
went back 20 (!) pages (each page showing 10 threads) and reported
each and every bit of spam, some of it dating back to late May - much
of it seems to have vanished now. I'm not taking credit for this
though, as I presume others have similarly done a binge of spam
reporting too!

Incidentally I haven't been reporting the rantings of our fascist
'friends' - of course I'd rather it wasn't here, but it doesn't quite
fit the category of straightforward spam - whilst it might be deleted
if enough people report it if GG does indeed use an algorithm
approach, I'm wary of my account being branded as one that reports
false-positives and hence perhaps my spam reporting being less trusted
in the future. Also, it's not like I want utl to be devoid of off-
topic posts - some of them are great, so I dare say the price of this
is just ignoring the morons.

And yes, before anyone says it, I know I know, everyone should be
using a 'proper' Usenet client and news server...!