The Kookfile Project

Sometime in early March 2007, there has been a large amount of crossposting from alt.usenet.kooks into alt.slack which has not been making our news reading experience very enjoyable. At the time of this update, the attack has subsided. However, the code shall remain in case someone decided to crosspost again.

Rationale

One has to remember that I came from the early days of computing when Usenet newsgroups were the way to exchange information. Back then, most folks haven't heard of the Internet, unless they were in college at that time and exposed to it that way, or they were fortunate enough to have access to it at work.

With limited bandwidth and deployment, one was very careful with posting replies to articles, as well as using careful discretion with creating new articles. Complaints were received when one posted excessive or inappropriate material and disciplinary action was taken.

These days, there's a glut of bandwidth, so we really don't mind as much. The Usenet traffic gets passed around all those streaming videos and other high-bandwidth and low-latency items.

What I Have

I became frustrated at the level of unreadability on alt.slack over the past few weeks, and started to look for something all the posts had in common. Then I found that they all were also posted to alt.usenet.kooks and I thought about their shenanigans over the years. They have done a lot of it, for sure.

I then decided it would be easy enough to write a Perl script to scan alt.usenet.kooks and look for the crossposts. The script could then mark crossposts in alt.slack as read and I wouldn't have to worry about them. It made sense to capture the message IDs of all those posts so others could use it as a guide to marking those posts as read on their clients, talking to their news servers.

Every time I run the script, I add to the list of crossposted articles, which is kept here for others to inspect and observe.

Goodies Associated With This Project

I have the following available:

• List of crossposted articles taken over some time.
• Perl script I use to mark crossposted articles as read (coming soon) ¹
• Perl script which works with the list of message IDs to mark articles as read on other newsgroups (coming later) ²

Endnotes

¹ As soon as I can come up with a way to handle news server authentication in a portable way. I'm not posting my script with my username and password embedded in it!

² I still haven't written this one yet.