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

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.