Sorry to be a party-pooper, but I find this disturbing. At one time or other I've helped moderate some 5-10 googlegroups. To begin with I felt they were the best thing since sliced bread. The information-gathering tools are superb – but that's all that can be said for them. All the googlegroups I know of have been closed down (to the relief of the membership) as forum owners come to realise that obscure obsolescent media do have the advantage of keeping one's affairs under the radar.
All "my" googlegroups proved to be hard work for moderators. No matter what protection you opt for, the barriers are semi-permeable. There's a whole industry in penetrating them, and you have to be ultra-cautious who you let in. Ensure the very existence of the group is visible to nobody but members – but that's not enough. Googlegroups are, after all, free mailing-lists for spammers who can break into them. In practice over 90% of applicants to join the groups I know of were bad actors. As time went on it grew steadily worse. Google has wonder tools for checking the usage history of an applicant, but it's not the work of a moment to use them. With a bit of practice you get to recognise the profile of a spammer, but the checking has to be done, and done promptly, i.e. within an hour or two. Else members are flooded with spam offering unwholesome products, or worse, and once you've banned the malefactor there's a helluva mess to clear up, which (for members) doesn't seem to stay confined to the forum. Spammers have tactics for overwhelming moderators to compel them to cut corners. You'd get a hundred or so applicants all at once, and the thing to do is reject the lot. I daresay my 2¢ will not be welcome, but I feel I ought to sound a note of warning. You are at liberty to dismiss it – my experience is 10 years out-of-date: plenty of time for Google to plug its many holes. But also plenty of time for spammers to hone their tools. Big friendly Google cuts cat-flaps in every door in your machine (*vide* Duck-Duck-Go) and where Google goes, others can follow. (Surely I must be teaching granny to suck eggs with all this – if so, my abject apologies. Put it down to my age.) But if notwithstanding we are all happy to embrace Google for the delicious bait in its mousetraps, I'd be inclined to try it out with something you can instantly shut down, like Chat – anyway a sweeter honeypot for bad actors – than Beta, which for all its low traffic I think of as mission-critical. Ian Clark On Tue, 22 Aug 2023 at 19:58, chris burke <[email protected]> wrote: > (This message is cross posted to programming and general. Please reply > to general, thanks.) > > Dear All > > We plan to migrate the forums from Mailman to Google Groups, which has > similar features. After the migration, the user experience of the > forums should be essentially the same. A new feature is a browseable > message list, for example see https://groups.google.com/g/osmand. > > See wiki page code.jsoftware.com/wiki/System/Forums/Migration for more > information. > > We expect to migrate the beta forum for testing early in September, > with the remaining forums to follow if all goes well. > > Chris > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
