I think this group is bolloxed

There's always

being

Although there is too much cr**p it's not quite as bad as rec.crafts.metalworking yet, any anyway perhaps you might need some Chinese shoes

AWEM

It's certainly got worse of late, which on top of being fairly quiet, gives a bad impression.

However it has plus points: * It's public and well known * It covers aspects of a diverse interest area in one forum.

I really don't understand why people subdivide groups so much as then wonder why they all get no critical mass. Spliting up steam engines, traction engines, boats, trams, manual tools and CNC seems a recipe for disaster.

Charles

And then breaking down just ONE of those areas into multiple other on-line only forums .... The noise here can be coped with, the advertising on some other 'sites' is getting more intrusive.

( That is not a dig at your site John ... I think you have the balance about right ;) )

A single general bolt hole is nice ...

I think this newsgroup has a long way to go before it degenerates to the extent of RCM with all its political BS. I don't have any filters on this group but I have about a dozen names in the filter for RCM and that cuts out probably 90% or more of the drivel from the protagonists responsible and makes RCM readable again.

I've been a lurker in here for years and haven't noticed much spam. Then I do get my feed from

I saw less when I used a proper news feed but corporate IT policies and a Blackberry condem me to Google Groups these days for most of my time.

Charles

I wonder if this is part of the problem? via news.btconnect.com I'm only seeing half a dozen spam messages in the last two weeks .... a lot less than I see on sf and my other lists

The 'proper' ISP news feeds seem to be rather better than Google Groups, but more people access the newsgroups via Google these days.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK snipped-for-privacy@prepair.co.uk

Yes the same discussion id going on on another usenet group that I frequent (not urw!). I use news.individual.net and see virtually no spam on any newsgroup. The other group has a couple of people on it who are/were part of uk.news admin and the consensus seems to be that if newsgroups are read via a newsreader there's no significant problem because newsffed servers implement the spam cancelling rules of usenet. If, however, they are read via another system which doesn't conform to usenet protocols then spam is a problem. Basically its google groups which is broken, or rather which makes no attempt to manage spam according to the usenet cancellation rules.

Thus this newsgroup isn't broken and doesn't require moderation. Those reading via non-newsreaders need to put pressure on their provider and/or possibly use a third party spam filtering programme.

HTH

Guy

I also use news.individual.net and see virtually no spam

Dave

two weeks .... a lot less than I see on sf and my

I am using news.individual.net and this has sent me 44 postings from this group in the last 7 days! I have used this German server for many years and it has been more reliable than any others. It costs 10 Euro's a year but it is well worth it.

news.btopenworld.com is what we use, with Agent for email and newsreading.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK snipped-for-privacy@prepair.co.uk

I see 14, via news.zen.co.uk - and 13 of them are from two chinese traders. Would be easy enough to filter them if they annoyed me enough that I could be bothered.

-- Peter Fairbrother

When I look for spam messages on individual.net the only spams that I have received are 3 x adverts in the last 150 messages counted!

A wholly classic hijacking of this thread :-)

I must admit that my generic spam filtering that I put in to cope with some of rcm, got almost all of the 16 that have come through this month.

Anyway, goon. What are you doing over there in the land of toy aeroplanes???

:-)

Must think of something on-topic to post about now...

Mark Rand RTFM

Another google groups reader here, from my phone... However this is usually the place I post if I actually want an answer, rather than some canadian posturing... It has been quiet lately tho.

Dave

Problem is I don't like the web interfaces to the web forums (fora?) they are very clunky for swapping a bit of plain text. I have tried to like them, but they are very inefficient for the task at hand.

With an internet forum like this how would you get access to moderate it? (Assuming you had a willing volunteer to delete the crud) never understood the governance around creating/ moderating Usenet forums.

Steve