Google Groups is Dead

This is a problem I see plaguing several code-related groups that I'm following, and it is very annoying (and up till now, mystifying) to see not only showing up in regular message flow, but also in abridged once-a-day summaries.<p>It's nice to see Google maintaining stuff like Groups and Code, but they don't seem to get very good maintenance. I've been finding myself saying the phrase "I wish they'd move this project away from google code and onto github" quite frequently lately. I suspect I'll be saying something similar for groups very soon..

John,<p>Would you be interested in taking a look at Zoho Discussions (<a href="http://discussions.zoho.com/home" rel="nofollow">http://discussions.zoho.com/home</a>) for your need? It is a powerful solution for setting up a user / developer community and is an offering from the Zoho suite of products. Zoho Discussions provides a lot of features (<a href="http://discussions.zoho.com/features" rel="nofollow">http://discussions.zoho.com/features</a>) comparable (and in many respects better than phpBB).<p>Feel free to contact me at dhan [at] zohocorp [dot] com or support [at] zohodiscussions [dot] com to discuss this further. Will be more than happy to support you in any way we can. :)<p>And since we use jQuery across Zoho, and greatly benefit from the productivity it offers, I am happy to offer the entire solution for free for your website - for as long as you choose to run it.<p>Regards<p>Dhan<p>Product Manager, Zoho Discussions

I used Mailman for the discussion group for beta testers of my app, and people were always confused about how it works or why they were suddenly getting emails from other people. But once I switched to Google Groups, people get it and participate a lot more.

Sorry everyone, my server has completely fallen over. Feel free to delete this post and I can re-post when it's back.

What's a good alternative? The spam problems in Google Groups totally suck, especially for very active groups, but it's a familiar system, so even non-techies can sign up and post fairly easily.<p>Is Yahoo groups even worse?

Google has a cache:<p><a href="http://74.125.77.132/search?hl=en&#38;safe=off&#38;rls=en-us&#38;q=cache%3Aejohn.org%2Fblog%2Fgoogle-groups-is-dead%2F&#38;aq=f&#38;oq=&#38;aqi=" rel="nofollow">http://74.125.77.132/search?hl=en&#38;safe=off&#38;rls=en-us...</a>

I haven't had much trouble with it. I just moderate the first post by a user and let the rest through. This has prevented any spam from getting through to my 1200+ member group.

Google Groups has severe privacy leak. If you post through the Google Groups Web UI, you can view the poster's IP &#38; user-agent via individual message headers.

Google could solve the spam problem in groups, they've solved it in gmail.<p>That they havent, is most likely a symptom of their size and having so many balls in the air.

An easy way for Google to fix the problem:<p>Lemma: most users are subscribed to Google Groups with their Gmail addresses.<p>Algorithm: GG should broadcast a new message to the Gmail accounts first and wait. If Gmail flags it as spam for p% of the receiving accounts, it should notify GG. GG should then send the message to spam (e.g. hold it for moderation), and not broadcast it to the rest of the subscribers. If Gmail gives it a green light, let it through.

The moderated groups that I read/contribute to are doing well. Spam isn't an issue there.

Rather than central moderation, which is appropriate in some cases but would lead to silly turf fights on others, GG ought to implement a simple voting system, not unlike YouTube comments (where particularly stupid things disappear after 6 downvotes).<p>Google really ought to consider the idea of putting NNTP back; it's obvious they don't really want to develop Groups as a tool (we can still hope for Wave to save the day, but...) and so GG looks more and more like the zombified corpse of Usenet. Perhaps if there was a push for Groups to have it's own Google Code API we might see some innovation.

I cant help but agree - I have to admit whenever I click through the support tabs on a projects site and see it go to a Google group my heart sinks.

Freelists is a nice service for FOSS projects. You might want to check it out.<p>Link: <a href="http://freelists.org" rel="nofollow">http://freelists.org</a>

I wish Google Groups worked out better for moderators, because as a user it's the only message system I enjoy using (versus my 300th phpBB or vBulletin registration/confirmation/login cycle).<p>I know some groups have promoted frequent posters to moderator status and this helps with the workload (though it sounds like the jQuery group already does this and it's still too much).

A moderated usenet group with the moderation being a 'reletivly' simple filter works well. For misc.writing.screenplays.moderated the moderation is basically just no cross-posting. It's public, a few spams slip through but are easily ignored (other than when a writer has a lovely snark reply). Getting a moderated group is non trivial but no too difficult.

Google Groups needs to switch to a Stack Exchange paradigm. I'm hard pressed to see what the disadvantage would be.

So is this link.

I just went to see if my ISP still had a usenet server I could use so I could use a spam-filtering tool at home but it seems that Bell has discontinued it. Looking at a list of usenet servers, it seems that more than half of US ISPs and the major Canadian ISPs no longer have usenet servers :/

Or, "Why I Use Mailman and Spam Filtering". I just talked to a list moderator about this issue yesterday, actually. It's highly annoying and some <i>project contributors</i> have actually posted on lists to say "Sorry, there's too much spam, I'm unsubscribing".

I would be glad to see the jQuery discussions moved to a normal forum and moderated accordingly. A good idea would be to use a HN style forum.<p>Google has failed to contain spam, even on discussion lists for their own offerings.<p>It is actually good advise to curate your own data.

I suppose google can't win at every project they undertake, the law of averages is bound to catch up. of course, there are other google projects with varying success, I use one called GWT whose succes is hard to measure

Cant google just add their spam filters for all the group messages too?

Google should split USENET from Google Groups. The first is useful, the second is questionable. The first is suffering terribly from it's conjunction (by Google) with the second.

And by extension, so is their usenet archive.<p>It's really puzzling, since gmail already has a decent spam filter - can't they apply that to groups?

As the article points out, Google Groups for private lists is awesome. Free and includes a gig of storage.

I moderate a few small google groups, and have been having similar spam problems.

I wonder if Google would replace management of Google Groups team...

Is the 404 a meta joke?

Go back to the school and learn what NNTP and Usenet were. =)