Got the same…
Some servers have decided to filter out all posts originating from Google Groups, as Google is unable/unwilling to fix the problem.
The flood on individual(dot)net has stopped, at least for now.
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Unfortunately, it has started again. They seem to come in in batches.
I have stubbonrly complained to Google about this (“Send feedback to Google”), as they claim to take spam seriously, but, unsurprisingly, no visbile reaction so far.
I have also tried to set up Thunderbird as a news reader via eternal-september, but that has been a failure as well, probably due to my ignorance about NNTP and similar protocols.
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It could be a proxy problem. I am using successfully news://news.uni-stuttgart.de:119 (read-only) in Thunderbird on several machines. And on one machine having a different proxy, it does not work.
I get an error: “connection refused”. And eternal-september only shows the general groups of the server, like info, support, info, etc. Nothing like comp.*
Connexion information: https://www.eternal-september.org/index.php?showpage=techinfo
Account creation: www.eternal-september.org
Yes, I am registered at eternal-september, but, like I said, Thunderbird does not show anything of interest to me in terns of newsgroups.
I’m not currently seeing the spam using individual(dot)net.
It has been a few days since I last checked, but c.l.f at news80.forteinc.com is also overrun with spam. I just marked as read over 2k posts. Hopefully I didn’t miss anything important.
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Thunderbird is a bit unconventional. You first have to create an new “newsgroups account” where you give the name of the server (news.eternal-september.org), then open the newly created account settings and check “always ask for an authentication to connect to this server”. Then, only when you try opening the group list, you are asked to enter your login informations.
Apparently comp.lang.fortran in Google Groups has been cleaned up, and it is safe to visit again. At least 13,000 messages have been deleted.
I still see the spam messages and I have not succeeded yet to get any one of the alternatives working for me. Sigh.
I still see all the spam (using google) and, what’s more, I am somehow blocked from posting a reply to the most recent posts (in order to recommend an array of pointers).
Mike
Google switched comp.lang.fortran (and a few other groups that were heavily spammed) to read-only. It effectively stopped new spam articles (the last one was in october), but you can no longer post to the group through Google Groups.
The only other decent web interface I know for usenet is http://news2.nemoweb.net , but the interface is french only AFAIK. Maybe on-the-fly translation tools of the browsers can help. Beware that it’s not httpS, so don’t use a password that you are already using elsewhere.
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Thanks for this tip. I’ll switch to nemoweb.
Mike
The language issue put aside, the nemoweb interface is actually much better than the Google Groups one. It has a few drawbacks, though:
- limited accessible retention (1000 last articles at most, which is not a lot on groups that are very active)
- only the big eight hierarchy, plus the fr.* one
- aggressive spam filtering (which is good) with possible false positives (which is less good), and some censorship issues. This concerns only fr.* as far as I know, not the big eight
- no responsive design and no version adapted to phones/tablets (it’s usable on tablets, but not very practical).
Nice features:
- you can easily track the answers to your articles.
- clicking on a parent group (for instance comp.lang.*) will show the articles of all the child groups.
- easy to insert pictures. They are transparently stored on the nemoweb server and converted to a link. So there’s no need of a third party image hosting provider.
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I think a significant number of users of comp.lang.fortran use the
google interface, as activity on the last few posts has been
unusually low. Or is it just the recent spam that was reaching
the level of a denial-of-service for such an interface that has
reduced responses?
I assume the google interface would be restored if the group were
moderated?
There are questions such as posed at
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.fortran/c/b6C40BPiW-M
that appear to be getting unduly low response ( RADIX and
SCALE should both support complex values, as it makes
generic code easier to generate IMO, by the way).
program demo_scale
implicit none
complex :: x
integer :: i
i = 2
x=(3.0,4.0)
! note RADIX does not take complex values either
! so have to do this instead of simply x*radix(x)**i
print *, x, i, scale_complex(x, i), x*radix(x%re)**i
contains
function scale_complex(cval, n)
complex, intent(in) :: cval
integer, intent(in) :: n
complex :: scale_complex
scale_complex = cmplx(scale(cval%re, n), scale(cval%im, n), kind=kind(cval%im))
end function scale_complex
end program demo_scale
The only other decent web interface I know for usenet is [http://news2.nemoweb.net ]
nemoweb seems have changed into a commercial site. What happened?
Mike
I read newsgroups on forteinc.com. It costs about $3/month. comp.lang.fortran has been overrun there lately with spam. I just logged in and deleted about 40k messages from the last couple of months since the last time I did the same thing. If there was anything useful posted there during that time, I won’t see it. I don’t know what will happen there in the future. I now use Thunderbird to read newsgroups, but it is not ideal. I used to use NewsWatcher, which was a great interface with lots of functionality, but it has not been supported for several years now. Before that, dating back to the late 1980s, I used a variety of news readers, including an emacs mode. Yes, someone programmed emacs to read newsgroups!
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