Re: The advantages of having a moderated newsgroup

On Wednesday, February 24, 2021 at 5:54:01 AM UTC-5, David Von Pein wrote:
> On Tuesday, February 23, 2021 at 1:03:38 PM UTC-5, John Corbett wrote: 
> > Primarily it keeps most of the posts on topic and at least somewhat civil. 
> > There is another benefit which became apparent this morning in an 
> > unmoderated newsgroup I participate in. We have one regular poster who 
> > likes to flood the newsgroup with off topic, moronic, and anti-Semitic 
> > posts. He uses a variety of screennames but it is obvious it is all the 
> > same guy. This morning he out did himself. Over the course of 25 minutes 
> > beginning at 8:23 AM, he posted 274 messages. Apparently he spent 
> > yesterday queuing them up for his morning dump (double entendre intended). 
> > At 30 posts per page, anyone wanting to get to the on topic threads would 
> > have to scroll through 9 pages of crap. Speaking for myself, having to 
> > wait a half a day for a message to post is a small price to pay for not 
> > having to put up with this kind of nonsense.
> I agree. :-)

Just an update. My other newsgroup is being bombarded with a continuous 
flow of gibberish posts. My guess is that somebody who obviously doesn't 
have a life has concocted software that automatically writes and submits 
posts that are completely nonsensical. I went to look at this newsgroup 
around 7:00 this morning and saw what was happening. I went all the way 
back to 6:03 am and there was continuous stream of these posts that has 
continued non-stop as I write this a few minutes after 10:00am. Just an 
example, one post was titled "glycerolize unfailing third with the 
heliocentric antelope squirrel". I don't suppose anyone can decipher this. 
It looks to me as if the program is just randomly slapping words together. 
The body of the posts is just more of the same. If someone has made any 
substantive posts in the mean time, they are being quickly swamped with 
the gibberish. I don't know what can be done about this nonsense but for 
now it has ruined the newsgroup because nobody is going to be able to 
carry on a dialog with thousands of new threads being continuously posted.