Darkling wrote:Quade wrote:You can disable the "Are you Sure?" prompt in the options too.
When you kill a poster, you'll get prompted. You can disable the prompt in the options. It's actually out of band from how you setup the shortcut.
How would your macro idea work?
Easiest way is to just direct you to an example:
http://www.wizcrafts.net/mwp-filters.htmlif you scroll down, you can see the structure of the xml file used to create a filter set.
If you scroll through it, you will notice a lot of filtering for stuff like domains, .ru, .ca, .nl etc. Plus tons and tons of general crap.
This kind of filtering has kept my mailbox free of frustration for the last 4 or so years. Unfortunately, the garbage has just about pushed me to
the point of usenet no longer being worth the hassle to deal with.
The spam has been horrendous the last...month or so? August and September have been ugly.. It's awful! I think a lot of it is virus or trojan horse files. Somehow when whomever that creates them creates them, they do so in such a way that they don't get caught by the duplicate checker (problematic when you're using the auto-download method). At least that's the way it seems to me - I ran out of space on my auto-download drive a number of times when some shmuck posted 60+ gigs of 500kb binaries to various groups I have auto-dl. Sometimes the files are a few megs big, so a simple size filter doesn't work on that crap. A lot of the files I'm trying to auto-dl are between 100kB-1mB.
What's really obnoxious, is they're getting better at making the subject line look like real non-spam posts, so you can't make a simple filter to filter them out. Generally anything that has the text "[COMPRESSED]" or "[COMPRESSED + CRACK]" or"[CRACKED + SERIAL] is going to be spam/malware, but they're not consistent about that. They've taken to putting ".ZIP" or ".RAR" at the end of the 'filename' so you can't just exclude .exe files. I think they probably really are zip or rar files, too. There's other examples that are more multimedia oriented, like "DVDRIP NTSC" "NTSC.PSPXPSP" "DVD3" "-x264-2008-BLiNKY" "-SRP" ").Retail.eBook-MAGBUSTERS" "1080p.BluRay.x264" (sometimes you see at the beginning or end of a 'run' they post just (what I assume is..) the automatically generated postfix to their various posts. which is kinda funny, I think. Too bad I can't figure out a way to classify a chunk of spam by these generated postfixes..)
Interestingly enough, my antivirus (kaspersky) usually doesn't catch the malware, but when it does, that's even worse, because its like a DOS attack with kaspersky trying to tell me about all these files, and 'quarantine' them (ie. make a copy to another drive, delete the original or disallow access to it), and I've got a slow computer, so while it scans and processes them all I can't just start at the top of a folder, click, scroll, shift-click at the bottom of the block of malware files and delete all at once. ERG!!
I wish newsbin had a button 'dispatch hitman', maybe with an icon of a set of crosshairs. You could just click on that guy, have a dialog box 'Are you sure?' [yes], then agent 47 would be tasked to eliminate that person/organization. Heck, I'd pay as much for that extra as I do for internet search :)! (business idea, newsbin.com guys!)
Unfortunately, as its been noted, they change the 'From' line in the posts fairly frequently, so the poster-lockout really only works for one 'chunk' of their posts. 'delete all posts from poster', as far as I know works faster, but only on that one group, so if they did the same thing to another group, you've got to see the posts there, as well, and 'delete all posts..' again. The problem with poster lockout being that if they chose the same 'from' as a REAL poster, then you lock out all the real posts, as well. Or delete all the real posts. I haven't seen a lot of that however. I could just be missing them 'cuz i locked them out at some point, come to think about it.!
Also some people aren't..mmm..what would be a good term... professional posters, lets say, and don't ever change the 'from' line in their posting software from whatever the default is, and so you see a lot of
'Yenc@power-post.org..' and the like that are good, real posts, but you also see a lot of amateur spammers using the same
'Yenc@power-post.org..' 'from' lines.
You see different ones sometimes in the porn groups (not that I spend any time there, except for, (cough) usenet research purposes (cough) :) with some semi-nonsensical english text, then a filename in the subject that's usually a number, followed by .jpg. "She is very young like?? 346457.jpg" "it hurts her so good sets! 235456.jpg" "spying on lolita girl in public 345.jpg 1455". I figure someone in either russia or china comes up with the first part, or maybe just the various words their program can choose from, and it randomly sticks phrases together. Who knows.
Ramble ramble, etc, etc. The short of it is, spammers have been prolific the past few months, especially malware posters, and it's not easy to filter them out. Maybe someone can invent a real-time-blacklist type deal for usenet? If newsbin could filter off of some of the actual header information, that would probably help, you could identify certain hosts or even just IP addresses where large chunks of spam are coming from & block them. I realize that's probably not possible without of course downloading the first bit of the post, but maybe that's included in the header info?
I wonder if in some cases the spam is just junk that isn't anything, random text or something, and it's just supposed to look like a real file in order to make it harder to find the real thing that the file pretends to be - think recording label, or movie studio, they hire anti-piracy consultants, and the consultant posts lots of files that look like the music label's artits, or the movie studios movies, but they post crap, so if people try to download whatever media they're trying to protect, they get frustrated and go buy the album/movie? I dunno.
Maybe it's skynet becoming sentient & this is what the communications betweens its equivalent to 'neurons' are. Instead of using seretonin, and dopamine and chemicals found in the brain, it's evolved using spam & subtle variations in the spam are it's 'thought'. Right now it's thinking 'DESTROY HUMANS! PENIS ENLARGEMENT! HAHAHA'
Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 12:50 pm