stackoverflow and c.l.py

[Steven D'Aprano]

memilanuk wrote:

> On 09/14/2011 05:47 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> The SNR here isn't bad either. Most of the spam gets filtered out, and
>> even stuff like Ranting Rick posts can be of some amusement when it's
>> a slow day...
> 
> I subscribe to the list via Gmane, and if 'most of the spam' gets
> filtered out, I'd hate to see how much gets submitted as I still see 2-5
> minimum blatant spam per day on here.

2-5 spam posts is nothing. (Well, I know any spam is too much spam, but
still.) Since nearly all of it is obvious, it's easy to filter out of your
mail client, news client, or if all else fails, your attention. The hard
ones to ignore are the ones that look like they might be legitimate, but
fortunately most spammers are too lazy or stupid to bother with even the
most feeble disguise.

Either way, I don't consider half a dozen spam posts a day to be anything
more than a minor distraction.

Commercial spam is annoying, but otherwise harmless because it is so easy to
filter. What's really the problem is crackpots, trollers and griefers,
because there is a terrible temptation to engage them in debate: "someone
is wrong on the Internet!". If you want to see a news group gone bad, go to
something like sci.math. You can't move for the cranks "disproving"
Cantor's Diagonal Theorem and Special Relativity and proving that 10**603
is the One True Actual Infinity (I'm not making that last one up!).



-- 
Steven