3 ms·

Wait?... people still spam there? Figured they had moved on long ago for better targets.... They must make some amount of money from it or they would not both

• bartread 6y ago
  Surprised me too. I guess they must be, although I can't believe it's that much. I imagine probably the reason it still happens is that it's incredibly low effort and so therefore worth it even for meagre gains.
  • jolmg 6y ago
    I don't really know how people do their spamming, but these may be long automated and forgotten systems. It may be that nobody has bothered to stop these systems or exclude usenet from being a target because there's no gain in doing that effort.
    • bartread 6y ago
      Possibly, although the content of the spam is fairly up to date: COVID nonsense and iPhone offers. That being said, now I look at the groups in more detail, it does seem like there's a concentration of messages in March and April on both these topics, and not a whole lot since. What makes it stand out more is that a bunch of the newsgroups I've subscribed to are very inactive, it turns out. I just yanked in anything related to retro computing and gaming and am slowing pruning the list back to include only active groups. The more active groups have spam but they also have self-promotional material that might or might not classify as spam, and I'm seeing a few mass crossposts as well. Overall it's not as bad as I remember it being the last time I looked at getting back into usenet, which was probably 8 or 10 years ago. I think I perhaps gained a slightly skewed impression as the first few groups I went through were all pretty spammy.