With a decent news client, participation is simple; even with a not-so-good client it can be done with a bit more effort. Read on.
But first, please understand that this web site and the Usenet Improvement Project are not just about the matter of improving your own Usenet experience; they are at least as importantly about not encouraging GG's use as a posting source in the first place.
In a manner in keeping with the workings of your proper news client, simply install a rule that is triggered by the appearance of the string googlegroups in the Message-ID (MID) header of articles to kill/bin/twit those articles. If your news client doesn't have adequate filtering capabilities (e.g., Thunderbird) you can accomplish this
with a local server like Hamster (Windows) or slrnpull or leafnode (both Linux/Mac). With them you can do your filtering on any headers you wish, and pull newsgroups from there with your client. For background on filtering and filter syntax specific to various news clients (and the local servers mentioned above), see the Filters pages.
If there are any messages from Google Groups that do not place this string in the MID header, it has not come to our attention. If you do see any that somehow avoid this simple rule, please report this via the Usenet newsgroup
news.software.readers. That group, by the way, is highly recommended for news client discussion in general.
Great site Blinky. Keep up the good work. I just killed 54 Google posts. The slaughter continues unabated. – James E. Morrow
I didn't think anyone could top the annual autumn spewage when college classes resumed--then along came the AOL/WebTV crowd. They're now morphing into GoogleGropers, like some biblical sequence of plagues. – Harold Stevens
I've finally had to join the Usenet Improvement Project, it took me a very long time to do so but I finally became convinced yesterday. I've been analyzing posts from GG and have to agree the percent that contain useful info is way too small to worry about. – XS11E
From my own informal sampling, the trash from Google _far_ outweighs the treasure and I'll gladly accept a few losses. – John McGaw
An ungodly large number of numbskulls use google groups and think they're posting to "Google Groups" when they're posting to USENET. – Magus
I finally gave up and I'm blocking google groups posters. Ever since I dropped Google Groups, the world has become a better place. – Evan Platt
