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SpamCop Newsgroups


dbiel

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SpamCop Newsgroups

The SpamCop Newsgroups are one of the oldest methods of getting information about SpamCop. They are still very much alive and active. They are accessed using any standard newsreader. They may be found at "news://news.spamcop.net/" Copying the address and pasting it into your browser will open up your default newsreader. (Note: there is a link to the SpamCop newsgroups server at the top of every page in these forums: Newsgroups) note: this link will also open up your default newsreader. The newsgroups currently consist of the following groups:

control (Admin)

control.cancel (Admin)

spamcop - originally the hard-core, expert level stuff, now the basic dumping ground for all.

spamcop.geeks - techy, geeky, specialized stuff, generally not SpamCop.net issues.

spamcop.help - kid-glove treatment area for newbies.

spamcop.mail - one of the earliest sources for SpamCop.net e-mail account support.

spamcop.routing - primary contact spot for routing issues, it is expected that you will do your homework first

...... (See Note #1)

spamcop.social - non-SpamCop.net related discussions, conversations.

spamcop.spam - originally a place to post your spam for discussion purposes, replaced by the use of a TrackingURL.

spamcop.test - a place to test if your newsreader is working and able to post queries in the newsgroups.

Note #1: per http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?...ost&p=64440 , Don's (SpamCop Admin) latest request is to e-mail deputies[at]admin.spamcop.net about routing issues. Please read the referenced Forum link to see the requested form and content.

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History of newsgroups ...????

Usenet is "huge" !!!!! There are very few providers that even make an attempt to carry most of the available newsgroups, even less that try to 'claim' that they carry them all .... and spammer actions over the last few years has served to force many folks into making many massive changes in how they are handled ....

Typical scenario .. you would login to your 'local' newsgroup server ... subscribe to a 'group' ... either you'd start by reading the existing posts or brave the waters and jump in directly to make your thread-starting post. At this point, your post only exists on this 'local' server. Somewhere during he day, this 'local' server would make a connection to another news server ... your post would be copied to that server, all the 'new' posts on the other server would be copied to your 'local' server .... repeat this action between the thousands and thousands of other news-servers around the world ..... eventually, your posting would end up existng on thousands upon thousands of news-servers around the world ....

This leads into a thing called "retention" .. say when first added to the 'carried' list, a particular newsgroup might have averaged 100 posts a day, so the Admin set aside 10Meg worth of disk space to hold that group's traffic, maybe good for 180 days worth of storage. Eventually, older stuff would age off, due to the deleting the old to make room for the new. On the other hand, another news-server Admin night have set up a 20Meg space allotment for the same group ... which would lead to a 'new' poster on this last server deciding to reply to a 200-day old post on that server .. but the result would be a 'new' thread starting with a Re: Subject Line to users on the first server mentioned ....thus feeding into quoting styles becoming an issue .. for those on the second server, the entire thread still exists, for those on the first server, the only 'previous' data to explain the background of the current post would be only what was quoted and brought forward (never mind the ire raised over replying to a 6-month old posting to begin with for some folks)

Then one runs into the issue that a newsgroup isn't necessarily a usenet item. Microsoft support newsgroups are one of these. Yet, some ISPs/Admin think they are doing a favour to their customers by carrying a 'local' copy of these specific newsgroups ... solving the headaches in trying to help the customer reconfigure their news-reader to talk to a different server ... the problem there is that posts made by these users to their 'local' copy do not propogate back to the actual Microsoft server .. so the user gets upset in that he/she is being "ignored" as his/her question never gets answered .....

Way back when, deja came up with the idea that all this traffic should be archived, so they set up a system to try to capture "all" usenet traffic and keep it available on-line forever .... this worked for a heck of a long time .... then Google came along, had a great idea, and bought the deja tool .... Google turned their engineers loose, and now we are stuck with the GoogleGroups crap ....

Now one adds in the spammer efforts .... ignoring the newsgroup subject matter, charters, rules, etc. and turning their crap software loose to jam as many messages as possible in as many places as possible .... in that example mentioned above, the 10Meg space set aside to handle 100 (plain text) posts a day worked fine until the day that 3,000 spam posts a day were coming in, a majority of them loaded with graphic images to make the advertising all that much more attractive .... that newsgroup basically died, as one could rarely find a 'real' posting amongst all the spam ....

As the years have gone by, new computer users have never heard of newsgroups .... some ISPs have decided to handle the issue by simply deciding not to "waste the disk space" by not offering newsgroup support on their systems, feeding into that even more 'new' users will never hear about newsgroups.

stopping here .... any reason to continue to add to this, throw it into another 'topic' ...?????

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