Much of the conversation and updates in the Ultimate Frisbee community happens through the antiquated and aging technology of Usenet and NNTP on a newsgroup named rec.sport.disc. The most popular way to access newsgroups these days is through their syndication on Google Groups. Unfortunately as of February Google’s captcha has been cracked which means that spammers can now post whatever they want onto Google Groups. I took way too much time to make a couple graphs visualizing the spam problem and thought I would share them with everyone below.
This first chart shows the total number of posts per day for a month long period along with the number of those posts that were spam and the number that were not spam. You can see that the spam overtakes the non-spam content on a couple of occasions but for the most part it hovers around 40% of the total posts to rec.sport.disc as you can see in the second graph. It is interesting to note that when the regular posts increased the spam seems to follow suit.
This is just a different way of looking at the data. It’s sad to see that some days 80% of the new post activity on the newsgroup consists of spam.
The reason I was curious about this was because I’m wondering at what point the community look for a new solution. On the other hand are people so used to ignoring the noise of the internet that they’re used to sifting through the spam and finding the content that they want. UltiTalk.com has attempted to move the community but I don’t think their site is inviting enough and it really doesn’t offer enough of an upgrade from rec.sport.disc on Google.
Who knows when someone will come up with a solution to this problem or if the community will ever mover away from the good old Usenet/NNTP/Google Groups mashup. Until then I guess RSD fanatics will just have to deal with a whole lot of spam.
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