Google groups pollution
I was looking for something specific on Google Groups. When I hit sort by date, I found almost only typical free for all posts. Turns out all those Google groups you can start are often full of what I’d term spam.
So, what we need is a way to blacklist certain groups individually. Which means, if I’m logged in, there should be a button next to each group (even if it’s a usenet group) that let’s me killfile it. Killfiling has been used on usenet for years to avoid having to see posts by trolls and people we dislike. What we need at Google Groups is a way to killfile entire groups so we don’t need to see the search results.
One especially bad group for my particular search term was “Mommies at home” and “Network Moms” (typical feminine topic, so that makes sense).
But there are loads of those groups, and with time, the pollution is only going to get worse!
April 26th, 2006 at 10:44 am
I was having a similar problem on rec.woodworking so I knocked together a GreaseMonkey script that adds a killfile option to Google Groups. No more trolls
It’s still under development but works pretty well. You can download it here Google Groups Killfile
Enjoy
April 27th, 2006 at 2:47 am
Damian:
While a killfile for removing users is nice, it doesn’t let me killfile whole groups, does it?
April 27th, 2006 at 7:04 am
No you’re right, the next rev of it will add regexp blocks for authors names at which point it will be pretty easy to apply that to subjects/groups. I’ll post an update when I’m at that point. As it is though it makes reading individual groups much more pleasant.