Other discussion groups have moderators to get rid of spam
and porn posters. Why not the excel forums?

I know it is very simple to just delete them and forget about
them but I'm sick of having to do it every time I log on.

C'mon Microsoft send in the cavalry and do some serious
butt kicking!

Regards
Martin

On Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:43:21 +1000, "MartinW"
wrote:

Other discussion groups have moderators to get rid of spam
and porn posters. Why not the excel forums?

Because this isn't a moderated newsgroup.

--
Steve Wolstenholme Neural Planner Software

EasyNN-plus. The easy way to build neural networks.
http://www.easynn.com

wrote in message
...
On Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:43:21 +1000, "MartinW"
wrote:
Because this isn't a moderated newsgroup.


Perhapd not quite. An old post from JE McGimpsey in August 2003:

Start of John's post
**************************************************
You can't, really. MS has a seriously good filter system that
rejects spam and inappropriate material, and MS administrators
monitor the groups, and can cancel messages that violate their terms
of service, but only on their server farm. You'll notice that the
offending article is no longer available via news.microsoft.com
(though it's undoubtedly available to those who connect via
different news servers). You as a poster/reader have no cancel
authority on the servers, and therefore can't delete the message.
However, the nature of newsgroups is that anyone can post from
anywhere, and it's inevitable that *some* spam will squeak through
the filters. Personally, the best way to handle it in my opinion is
to mark it read and forget about it. A small escalation would be to
set a filter to delete messages with that topic, or from that poster
(my personal kill file is approaching 4000 entries). Since you're
using OE6 to read news, David McRitchie's OE page may be of interest:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/oe6.htm
The worst thing to do, again in my opinion, is to waste your time
and others' by replying to it - spammers don't read the newsgroups.

************************************************** ****
End of John's post.

I can vouch for the *seriously good filter system* because I have had
several posts fail to appear which, when I checked what I had actually sent,
had typos that I am sure made them fall foul of the spambots.

That said, there does seem to be a lot more spam appearing than the
***inevitable that *some* spam will squeak through the filters*** that there
used to be.

--
Regards,

Sandy
In Perth, the ancient capital of Scotland


with @tiscali.co.uk

MartinW wrote:
Other discussion groups have moderators to get rid of spam
and porn posters. Why not the excel forums?

I would not want these to be moderated groups. Moderators introduce
delays due to the very nature of the beast -- unless the moderator
installs a program to perform the approval automatically, in which case
there is little value in having a moderator. But typically, a
moderator would review the postings only once a day -- often at night
(in his/her timezone) after his/her day job. Even when there are
multiple back-up moderators, there are annoying delays of many hours,
at best. Most people want quick responses to their how-to questions.
This expectation is very different from newsgroups with weightier
purposes.

I know it is very simple to just delete them and forget about
them but I'm sick of having to do it every time I log on.

I don' t know what "forum" you are seeing a spate of spam/porn in. I
use Google Groups to read the microsoft.public.excel.* newsgroups, and
I have seen almost no spam/porn -- certainly much less than other
unmoderated newsgroups that I participate in.

Knock on wood!