21 Dec
2010
21 Dec
'10
5:08 p.m.
Richard wrote:
In article William Donzelli writes:
Its still useful for programming discussions, but for all the
chit-chat type stuff its pretty much been replaced by the balkanized
world of inferior web forums. The distributed control nature of
usenet also lent itself to excessive abuse by spammers and the usenet
community never really came up with a useful way of dealing with that.
Many people retreated to mailing lists as a result of the spam
problem.
While novice Usenet users will still be caught when they provide their
Return Address in the
clear, most experienced Usenet users post with their Return Address in a
manner which
confuses only the least capable e-mail harvester programs. Also, one of
the Usenet sites
which I check used to have a Moderator e-mail address available which
would obliterate
the Return Address by changing it to <spamtrap at crayne.org>. After
crayne became
unavailable, that stopped for a short time, but is now replaced by
something a bit more
complicated. So the problem of spammers really is not that bad for
experienced Usenet
users at this point.
By the way, other than the current problem of subscribing to cctalk (has
it been fixed?),
what prevents an old subscriber from harvesting our e-mail addresses?
The fact that I
send my Return Address in the clear seems to suggest that either there
are too few
members of this list to make a difference or that Jay has been able to
prevent spammers
Hmm. Let
me think. Isn't this called Usenet?
Didn't Usenet die back in the late 1990s?
from obtaining our e-mail addresses. I suspect the
former since I seem
to remember
seeing some of my posts to cctalk on google. By the way, just how many
members of
cctalk are there at this point?
I also see my posts to Usenet on google, but the difficulty of
responding and the format
used makes it useless for me to participate. Which is why I add more
than "nospam"
to my e-mail address when sending a post to Usenet.
I personally monitor 5 Usenet sites (only one is an alt.* site) via a
free Usenet server which
accepts short TEXT-ONLY posts. While the traffic is not as high as it
used to be, there is
still limited help available.
Jerome Fine