Loads of spam on comp.lang.fortran

FYI: You may or may not have noticed it, but there is an awful lot of spam being posted on the Fortran newsgroup. While it is not as active as it used to be, it is still a valuable source of information to people.
I report the spam I find, but right now there are at least 40 posts in a short while that can only be regarded as spam - they are easy to note: the text is in some Asian script.

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Yes, once in a while it gets heavily polluted when spammers succeed to pass the antispam filters. On my side I see only 7 spams (I am using news://news.uni-stuttgart.de:119/comp.lang.fortran for reading).

No visible spam on (one of the) server(s) I am using, but no post for the last 8 days:

Each server seems to have its own spam filter. I see also no normal post since the 2023-10-04.

Definitely. There also are a few antispam bots that send cancel articles on the whole network, but each newsmaster is free to accept or deny the cancellations on their servers.

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This is what I am seeing right now, I’ll go ahead and report them

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The server I use, individual.net, is very good at keeping spam out. Not perfect, but I can go weeks without seeing any spam in c.l.f.

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I see the same.

I use it as well. It’s not free but the rate is reasonnable (10€/year). Among the free servers, I think that eternal-september.org has also a good spam filtering policy.

Thanks. Your link does not work, maybe because of https. I fixed it:

Frequent spam on c.l.f. was a major motivator to create the Fortran Discourse.

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A few minutes to report the spam gave me the following:

A day or two should clear the list up, at least for me.

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Indeed, I found a much shorter list just now and removed the spam reactions in these posts.

One reason for being alert to this: a couple of years ago Google decided that c.l.f. was not worth tracking anymore as there was too much spam. It happened to several newsgroups and while I know that Google groups is not the most appropriate way to use the newsgroups, it is convenient to me.

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It’s not specific to comp.lang.fortran. Google Groups has a very poor antispam policy (not only they mostly don’t filter out the spam they receive from other servers, but their server is itself a know source of spam). And more than that, they absolutely don’t care at all about usenet groups (which is pity, as they own the full archives; but the search engine in the archives is de facto broken).

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For several years now , until 2 days ago, there has been very little spam in comp.lang.fortran on Google Groups. I have reported about 20 spam messages to Google yesterday and today. We will see if they take any notice.

Today, I noticed very similar spam in another newsgroup. Not as extensive, but spam nonetheless.

clf is now full of spam on news.individual.net as well :frowning: . Unsurprisingly, the spammer(s) use Google Groups to post their sh**.

Yes - I reported this to their abuse address.

Reply from individual(dot)net:

Yes, we are painfully aware of it, but the spam is so massive and
random that it is very hard to fight with our tools without risking
too many false positives or cutting off Google entirely (there are
still a lot of people that use Google Groups legitimately).

We are trying to eliminate as much as possible, but you might also
want to check out if your newsreader has some filtering capabilities.

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The same problem seems to exist in other Google groups like C and C++, besides Fortran.