!!! About the "Sporging" Threat to rec.photo.digital

There was the same threat to rec.birds the other day.... they weren't
kidding!!

There is a new ugly phenomena making the rounds of newsgroups. It is called
"sporge flooding". Without going into great detail, it is the flooding of a
newsgroup with thousands of bogus messages making the news group basically
useless. It serves no purpose other than vandalizing a newsgroup.

You can read more details he

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporge

I read a group call rec.birds about wild birds. It usually has 20 to 50
messages a day. Today in a few hours it has over a thousand with random
subjects all from bogus people, making it unreadable. Luckily there is also
a group that most of the same posters read called rec.binaries.birds which
has been unaffected. How long it will last, I don't know.

What I have suggested there is that anyone who wants to post to rec.birds,
should put 3 exclamation points in front of the subject just as I did in
this message (!!!Subject). That will make everyone's real posts and the
replies to them show up at the top of all the crap as long as the reader has
their posts sorted by subject.

Anyway, hope it doesn't happen here, it is a real mess. If it happens here,
think about posting that way and you might be able to actually read each
other's posts. So far the sporgers have not used and characters like
exclamation points, colons, etc., in the subject line of their posts.

By the way, for those using Outlook Express, you can sort the messages you
see by subject in alphabetical order by clinking on the word "Subject" at
the top of the "Subject" Column. That will sort the messages by subject from
A to Z and characters like exclamation points will come before A. Clicking
on "Subject" again will sort from Z to A. Clicking on other columns like
"From" and "Sent" will sort them that way.
--
Les Stewart
Beaumont, TX